People will recall that political economy started out as moral philosophy (a la Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy) then evolved into the study of national economies, then reverted to the narrower scope of economics, focussed on the idealised “economic actor”.
For those who like their political economy to roam free there is a treasure trove of essays in the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The lecture series was established by Obert Clark Tanner (1904-1993), an American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist. In the latter part of his career he was based at the University of Utah and in 1978 he permanently endowed the Tanner Lectures on Human Values which are presented annually at several universities in England and the United States.
The lectures can be sourced from this page, by name of lecturer. A sample of the names Raymond Aron, Saul Bellow, John M Coetzee, Richard Dawkins, Umbeto Eco, Dyson Freeman, Nadine Gordimer, Jurgen Habermas, Michael Ignatieff, Leszec Kolakowski, Martha Nussbaum, John Passmore, Ilya Prigogine, Joan Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Amartya Sen, Herbert Simon, George Stigler.
