IN recent years a number of economists, including several who have been actively concerned with questions of public policy, have expressed the point of view that economists working in this field should concentrate their attention on economic considerations and not to take into account political considerations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the validity of this point of view. The attitude that economists engaged in analyzing or forming public policy should ignore political factors has been vigorously supported by such well-known men as Milton Friedman, the late E. A. Goldenweiser, and Edwin G. Nourse. Friedman, for example, has written: "The role of the economists in discussions of public policy seems to me to be to prescribe what should be done in the light of what can be done, politics aside, not to predict what is 'politically feasible' and then to recommend it." 1 Goldenweiser has stated, "I agree emphatically with Friedman that economists must think things out on their merits without regard to political feasibility." 2 To the layman or the neophyte student of economics it may appear that statements such as these represent an attempt to maintain a tradition of long-standing in the field of economics, and thus to preserve the integrity of economics and economists against recent incursions or defections. To those who are familiar with the history of economic thought and the development of economics as a social science, however, it is obvious that the attitude expressed by Friedman and Goldenweiser is not firmly based in tradition. McCulloch, a leading exponent and synthesizer of traditional economic theory in the first half of the nineteenth century, went so far as to write in the preface to the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy, . . ."the truth is that Political Economy and Politics are so very closely allied, and run into and mix with each other in so many ways, that they cannot always be separately considered." 3