MASUDUL ALAM CHOUDHURY- ISLAMIC ECONOMICS AS SOCIAL SCIENCE

It can be summarized as below...

Compartmentalization of Knowledge in Western Social Sciences

- The field of social sciences comprising in the main the disciplines of economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, but secondarily also of social psychology, religion, law and history, is a product of the eighteenth century

-  The Physiocratic school upheld the primacy of agriculture as the principal productive activity of the nation. The ethical meaning in it are as follows ;
 a) satisfaction of basic needs was the primary goal of the social economy.

 b) it showed that agricultural production was upheld in favor of maximizing employment and use of labor intensive technology.

 c) sectorial linkages with agriculture would result in price stability in the product and factor markets.

 d)  full capacity utilization in labor intensive production with the primacy of agriculture, meant stable wages for the producers.

Continuing Insulation of the Social Science Disciplines in the Twentieth Century
-  there has been specialization in the area of developmental-ism, explaining the social and economic developmental processes; there have been works in the direction of developing social systems and interaction-ism.

The Evolution of Economics as a Social Science in the Twenty-First Century: The Mixed Economy and the Re-emergence of Political Economy.

A mixed economy is defined as the environment conducting the distribution of wealth and resources under menus of production and consumption that are either evolved in the market system or the command type economic system.

The factors that gave rise to the emergence of the mixed economy are:

(1) the importance of government investment, planning and control of large sectors of the economy.

(2) the changing role of profits in relation to economic growth.

(3) labor and capital market imperfections in the hands of powerful labor unions and stock markets.

(4) the existence of the welfare state in Western nations; (5) the international division of labor and sharing of resources.

The emergence of the mixed economy points to the dawn of a re-emergence of political economy.

Political economy is defined here as the integrated study of social phenomena in their widest variety, with the assumptions, social and moral conditions, and methodology, capable of providing both an analytical as well as an institutional examination of the social problems.

Difference in definition from textbook is due to two factors 


a) There is the absence of a predetermined causal relation in Marxist Dialectic.

b) In the institutionalize framework there is the absence of analytical requirement of the underlying methodology, within which the study of institutions is to be subsumed.
Future Evolution of Economic Science


- The treatment of the study of economics in the future as a mixed economy, investigated within the methodology of political economy.

- In the field of economics, institutional economics, mixed economy and political economy are penumbras of each other with a common core.
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