Business & Politics in America

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this course, we examine the sometimes productive, sometime corrosive, relationship between business and politics in America. To do so, we will focus on the ways in which the relationship between business and politics in America has facilitated the rise of extractive forms of exchange and rent-seeking practices at the expense of genuine value creation brought about by voluntary cooperation in productive activities. Throughout the course, then, we will pay close attention to debates—philosophical, theological, political—about the determinants of value in a market economy, including the relative voluntariness of its participants, the definition of “rents” as a kind of unproductive, and so extractive, form of economic activity, and the continuing appeal—for political and business leaders alike—of exercising managerial control over the masses, i.e., their fellow citizens. To illustrate the significance of these debates, and the social implications of the answers provided by their participants, we will investigate how America’s political class has been utilized as an instrument of extraction and rent-seeking by market actors throughout our nation’s history, covering the post-war Gilded Age, the Depression and New Deal, the deindustrialization and deunionization of the American economy in the 1970s, and the globalization of trade in the 1990s. Ultimately, students will be asked to reflect on the moral significance of the ends for which political and economic power has been deployed in an era marked by the rise of big business, the emergence of mass politics, and the expansion of public power to control its citizens.