In this new series the History Department will be highlighting some of the new and innovative courses being offered by our faculty over the next year. In this edition one of the Department’s newest members, Assistant Professor Amy C. Offner, talks with us about her new course that addresses the different ways we conceive of economics and capitalism throughout history and in the present day. This course was funded by an inaugural course development grant from Penn’s Social Science and Policy Forum. The undergraduate seminar will meet on Thursdays from 1:30-4:30 this fall.
JR: You are teaching a course called “Thinking about Capitalism.” This is a course that could exist in a history department; it could also exist other places on campus. Given that it is offered in the history department, what is the geography and chronology covered by this course?
AO: It’s broad. The subtitle of the class is “A Social and Global History of Ideas.” The class invites students to denaturalize concepts that are so natural to us today that it is hard to think of them as having any history: the concepts of the economy, economics and economists. These concepts didn’t exist anywhere in their present form during the late eighteenth century, but historians disagree on when and how they emerged, and how uniform they have been across time and place. To some extent, those disagreements stem from historians’ tendency to study individual countries or regions. This has produced a bunch of competing stories about different parts of the world.
The story that people are most familiar with, the story of Western Europe and by extension the United States, often starts with Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation and identifies the nineteenth century as a critical time. But in Latin America, for instance, the economics profession and the discipline of economics didn’t exist until after 1945. A notion of the economy did exist, though. There’s very uneven development, and quite a bit of debate among historians.
We’re going to be examining these questions in a number of different parts of the world and over the space of several hundred years, starting in the late eighteenth century and coming up through the present day. We’ll start off trying to put together an Anglo-American story, and then see if our ideas change when we look at the global south in the twentieth century, from Southeast Asia to Egypt to Mexico.
JR: What are the questions that were driving you when you were putting the course together? And what questions do you hope the students in the class will spend the most time thinking about?
AO: I’m curious about the way that economic reasoning pervades our lives and the authority that economists have in public life. Why and since when have people deferred to economists, or even regarded economics as a distinct form of knowledge? When did the economy even become a concept used in the contemporary sense? What other concepts have people used to make sense of material life?
The course starts out by introducing students to some classic texts on non-economic ways of thinking about material life that preceded, undergirded, or challenged economic reasoning. We look at evangelical Christianity during the early nineteenth century, for instance, and how it provided terms in which people made sense of capitalist transitions. Likewise there are great books presenting moral economy and republican political thought as ways in which people reasoned about commerce. Much of this literature originated with studies of Western Europe and the United States, and then historians and social scientists tried to transfer concepts elsewhere. We’ll read James C. Scott’s first book arguing that the idea of moral economy explained the behavior of peasants in Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. Is that convincing? More generally, have there indeed been times and places in which people did not understand material life in economic terms? If so, how did we get from there to a world in which you have to ask an economist if you want to make school lunch policy?
Along the way, we’ll encounter what I hope will be surprising arguments for the students. We’ll read sociologists Marion Fourcade and Sarah Babb on how economists and economic knowledge have been defined in vastly different ways across countries, and yet we do see some genuinely global understandings of these categories. We’ll read Viviana Zelizer, Jeanne Boydston, and Arlie Hochschild on how intimate life and the home became imagined as refuges from economic activity and reasoning, and how people have made sense of the production, consumption, and exchange that has always happened in those contexts.
JR: You’ve got this word “thinking” in the title of the course. Does the class take an intellectual history approach?
AO: I think of this as a social history of economic ideas. To me, that means two things: looking at the context of social conflict, change, and daily experience that forces people to devise explanations of their world. It also means that I’m interested in popular ideas. Traditionally the history of economic thought has been a history of professional economists orfigures like Adam Smith, who were ultimately appropriated by economists as their progenitors. We’re exploring popular ideas, how they developed in relation to professional expertise, and how both related to lived experience.
JR: Are there any pre-requisites for this course?
AO: There are formally none! This class is a real experiment and I think it’s within reach of curious undergraduates. It doesn’t require any training in economics, and we won’t be using any economic tools. What students need is an ability to reflect on their own assumptions and mental categories, because we live in a world where this is the air we breathe