Editorial
in TheoriaIn 1991, Charles Simkins, the doyen of economic demography in South Africa, wrote an article in Theoria entitled ‘The Scope and Methods of Political Economy’. In this article, a reworked version of his inaugural lecture as the Helen Suzman Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Simkins made a powerful case that economics is, of necessity, a moral science. Through the years, a concern with the intersection of politics, economics and the moral dimensions of the ‘human condition’ has been a recurrent theme, and organising motif, of this journal. Many of its contributors have, in diverse and often resonant fashion, reminded readers of the importance of this intersection and of extent to which the understanding of the economy is embedded in an appreciation of its broader historical — that is to say political, societal and cultural — contexts.