Politics & Power Quote by Stephen Leacock

Leacock’s line lands like a polite academic paper that suddenly pulls a pin. The joke is built on a dry, almost bureaucratic structure - “It’s called X because…” - then it detonates into a blunt negation that mocks the very premise of the discipline. Political economy, a field that should be the marriage of power and money, is accused of being a hollow label: impressive on the syllabus, evasive in practice.

The intent is less to dismiss economics than to puncture its self-mythology. Leacock, trained as an economist but famous as a humorist, is needling a profession that often hides behind jargon and abstraction while claiming relevance to real political life and real economic struggle. The subtext is: we’ve built a science that talks around the things people actually fight over. “Politics” becomes the messy business of interests, coercion, and compromise - inconvenient variables that models prefer to treat as “external.” “Economy” becomes lived material reality - wages, rent, hunger, boom-and-bust - flattened into curves and assumptions.

Context matters: Leacock writes in an era when economics is professionalizing and “scientific” authority is becoming a cultural credential. By calling political economy unrelated to either parent term, he’s satirizing the academic habit of laundering ideology as neutrality. It’s also a warning shot at technocracy: when experts claim to manage society while pretending society’s conflicts don’t exist, the expertise can become a kind of elegant irrelevance. The wit works because it’s not just a punchline; it’s an indictment of how disciplines defend themselves from the world they claim to explain.