ידיעון תשס"ט

קישוט
 

שימו לב: לוח הבחינות יפורסם בתחילת חודש ספטמבר.

Transformations of Political Economy, 1776-1884

סילבוס
(קורס מספר 06592031)

סמינר

ד"ר סיימון קוק

Conventionally the history of economics begins with the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). In the following century, so the story continues, Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx developed certain of Smith’s doctrines, thereby creating ‘classical political economy’. Then around 1870 modern economic science emerged when other doctrines of Smith were translated into the language of the differential calculus. This conventional history is accepted by both mainstream and Marxists economists, and is tacitly supported by much postmodernist criticism of the ‘enlightenment project’ supposedly embodied in Smithian economics. The starting-point of this seminar is a conviction that this convention is flawed beyond redemption. The aim of the seminar is three-fold: (i) to demonstrate the inadequacy of this convention with regard to the history of British political economy in the century following the publication of the Wealth of Nations, (ii) to investigate some of the complex processes involved in the construction of this convention, and (iii) to generate resources that might be of use in the construction of an alternative history of political economy. The working assumption of the seminar will be that these tasks can only be accomplished by taking account of (a) the wider intellectual history of the period (e.g. developments in psychology, moral and natural philosophy), and (b) the wider social and political context of this intellectual history (e.g. the French Revolution and the emergence of the factory system).


This seminar will be held on Sundays, 12.00 – 4.00 pm, and conducted in English. Students will be required to make one class presentation and to submit an end of term paper; the subject of this paper to be decided through consultation with the instructor.

Syllabus

The following syllabus is intended to provide a sense of the kind of material and likely direction of the seminar. However, the seminar is conceived as an open-ended investigation. Hence, if any issues command our attention and appear to require further investigation we will pursue them at the expense of other material.

The procedure we will follow in approaching our material will not be chronological, and perhaps demands both a brief explanation and also an overview. In a nutshell, the half-century following the French Revolution (1789) constitute a particularly contentious period of British intellectual history, and it therefore makes sense to arrive at secure foundations before tackling the developments of these stormy years. We will therefore begin by exploring three distinct themes: (i) the actual writings of Adam Smith in the late 18th century, (ii) a number of readings of Adam Smith developed in 1858 and the 1870s, and (iii) the relationship between these Victorian readings and contemporary developments in political economy. Only once we have grasped the (quite astounding) gap between what Smith thought he was doing and the various things the Victorians were convinced he was doing will we turn our attention to the complex and fraught processes by which Smith’s vision of commercial society was transformed almost beyond recognition in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. Finally, and as this early nineteenth-century transformation comes into focus, we will return to the 1870s and attempt to reinterpret some of the key moments in what is usually taken to be the emergence of modern economics.

Note that good scholarly editions of many of our primary texts may be found online at the ‘Online Library of Liberty’: http://oll.libertyfund.org. (Also useful is the ‘Internet Text Archive’: http://www.archive.org – use ftp option).


Week 1: ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’
(i) T. H. Buckle, History of Civilisation in England (1858), volume 3, chapter 5 (on Adam Smith’s method)
(ii) Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part I, Section I + Part II, Section II


Week 2: Education in History
(i) Marshall, manuscript notes on Wealth of Nations (WN), Book V, articles (c. 1870)
(ii) Smith, WN, Book V, articles on education (1776)


Week 3: Natural law, Deduction and the Historical Method
(i) T. E. Cliffe Leslie, ‘The Political Economy of Adam Smith’ (1870)
(ii) Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (c. 1762)


Week 4: Social Science and Evolution
(i) Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the 18th Century (1876), volume II, chapter IX, Part IV (on Smith’s political economy)
(ii) Smith, WN, Book V, chapter 1 and 2


Week 5: Some Contexts of Adam Smith
(i) Knud Haakonssen, ‘Protestant Natural Law Theory’ (2004)
(ii) Haakonssen, ‘Natural Jurisprudence and the Theory of Justice’ (2003)
(iii) Hans Aarsleff, ‘Philosophy of Language’ (2006)


Week 6: Common Sense Philosophy
(i) Thomas Reid (reading to be decided)
(ii) Dugald Stewart (ditto)


Week 7: Malthus: God, Nature and Morality
(i) T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1789)
(ii) A. Waterman, Christian Political Economy (1991)


Week 8: Ricardo’s ‘Classical Political Economy’
(i) David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy (1817)
(ii) Smith, WN, Part I


Week 9: James Mill’s Philosophical Radicalism
(i) James Mill, ‘Essay on Government’ (1820)
(ii) James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829)


Week 10: Coleridge and Romantic Criticism
(i) Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)
(ii) Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty (1996)


Week 11: ‘Economic Man’
(i) John Stuart Mill, ‘On the Definition of Political Economy’ (1836)
(ii) Neil de Marchi, ‘The Case for James Mill’ (1983)


Week 12: Jevons’s Mechanical Mind
(i) W. S. Jevons, Theory of Political Economy (1871)
(ii) Harro Maas, ‘Mechanical Rationality’ (1999)


Week 13: Alfred Marshall’s Psychology
(i) Alfred Marshall, ‘Ferrier’s Proposition One’ (c. 1868)
(ii) Marshall, ‘Ye Machine’ (c. 1868)


Week 14: Historical Economics
(i) Smith, WN, Book III
(ii) Marshall and Marshall, Economics of Industry, chapter 7 (1879)
(iii) Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (1884)


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