THE ECONOMIC NATURE OF NATIONAL SECURITY: FROM CLASSICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY TO GAME THEORY AND RESILIENCE ECONOMICS

Summary

The economic nature of national security is examined as an economic category through a comparative analysis of classical political economy, neoclassical economics, Keynesian economics, game theory, and resilience economics. The way classical political economy links security to property protection, contract enforcement, and the fiscal implications of defence spending for accumulation and reproduction is analysed. It is established that the neoclassical approach explains insufficient security provision by external effects, the properties of public goods, and the collective-action problem; the limits of state instruments are also delineated in terms of information and administrative constraints and exposure to rent-seeking behaviour. It is determined that the Keynesian strand associates security with macroeconomic governability, the stability of employment and production, and fiscal capacity, as well as with demand-management requirements under resource mobilisation. It is shown that contemporary approaches deepen the economic interpretation of security by focusing on strategic interdependence and on requirements for maintaining functionality and recovery in interconnected systems, which is conceptually consistent with the joint use of game theory and resilience economics. Comparative features of the approaches are synthesised, and conclusions are formulated on the multi-layer nature of national security within economic theory.