PolEconThought in 19th Century

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course offers a graduate-level introduction to some of the most frequently considered texts of political economy, political theory, and social thought of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The main focus of the course is the development of market, civil, and commercial society under the economics and politics of capitalism, and the several ways in which it has been conceptualized, analyzed, and critiqued. We will read some influential thinkers – including Rousseau, Hume, Smith, Mill, Marx, Weber, Keynes – as well as significant secondary literature that will serve either to contextualize or frame methodological issues arising in the debates over the interpretation of texts. This course is an intensive reading seminar. Requirements: short reading notes in selected weeks; a seminar paper.