All courses numbered 500 and above are graduate courses.
Undergraduates need to submit a course permit to enroll.
HIST 620 Economic Ideas from Adam Smith to Marx
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
This seminar traces the evolution of the main economic ideas of classical economic liberalism from Adam Smith through Malthus, Ricardo, Say, List to John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. The course will consider how and why Smith's description of markets became the orthodoxy and what assumption about “universal laws,” universal human nature and the definition of rationality have to be made for that description to be reliable. We shall read together the main works of these thinkers and at the end consider Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence (2006) to help us re-think the problems of classical liberalism in the globalized capitalist system of today.
