Studies on Power

There have been only a few surveys of radical economics and of those most have focused on a specific topic in economic literature. In the first years of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) there were several proposals of definition of radical economics, including a foundational reliance on Marxian economics, the elaboration of an anti-marginalist paradigm, or the idealization of a radical scholar-activist. After an early enthusiasm, attempts at this kind of normative work fell away. Instead what drove radical work forward was critique and adaptation from pre-existing work in economics, particularly with respect to labor markets and its stratification. With labor issues often at its core, radical extended work into the analysis of education, gender, and the firm. Efforts to bring these strands of work together took a distinctively institutional flavour, not with the label of paradigm or radical, but as social structures of accumulation. The chapter concludes by examining radical textbooks and how they recorded the evolution and contributions of radical research.