Political economy seems to make a comeback despite a history of long neglect and an increasingly uncompromising epistemological environment. This paper argues that contemporary political economy is characterized by a conceptual flexibility, thereby the term ‘political economy’ carrying multiple meanings.  The current reinvigoration owes much of this flexibility to the underlying conceptions of classical economy in select canonical literature.  The literature that will be taken up here consists of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’économie poltique, Richard Jones’ Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, Karl Marx’s  Grundrisse and Capital, and finally Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Overall, a dichotomy between critiques of political economy and critiques in political economy will be identified with some authors’ works wavering in-between.  It will be observed that Smith was critical of political economy, which he associated with systems such as mercantilism and physiocracy he was critical of, and deliberately chose to entitle his book as Wealth of Nations to differentiate it also from his precedent and archrival Sir James Steuart’s work with ‘political economy’ in the title.  The following section will explore how Ricardo and Say, two disparate economists both professing to be under Smith’s influence, presented themselves as barely elaborating further Smith’s approach, thereby limiting their engagement at best to a moderate critique in Smith’s territory, ended up serving the redefinition of the emergent disciplinary terrain as ‘political economy’.  The third section will dwell on Richard Jones who set out to criticize Ricardo by resort to Smith in order to pave the wave to a historical critique.  In juxtaposition, Marx originally aimed to carry out an ambitious critique of political economy by emphasizing the distinction between ‘the historical’ and ‘the universal’, but as he fell under the spell of Ricardo’s analytical framework, his critique was gradually scaled down considerably to a critique within political economy. Finally, Polanyi’s work that contains a most original as well as critical assessment of classical political economy will be taken up. With a new light it casts on the tradition, while also suggesting a plausible alternative by the institutional scheme of analysis characteristic of the whole work, it will help us round off the argument.