All courses numbered 500 and above are graduate courses.
HIST 720 Economic Ideas from Adam Smith to Marx, Mill and Maine
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
This seminar traces the evolution of the main economic ideas of classical economic liberalism from Hume and Smith through Malthus, Ricardo and Say to Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sumner Maine. 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 re-think the problems of classical liberalism in the globalized capitalist system of today.
