This course explores the development of the practices, relations of power, and formation of a “science” of “economics” from medieval European notions of justice through to its development as neoliberalism. This five-day shows how a science or form of knowledge not even assumed to exist that long ago in historical memory has been paired with the political in political arithmetic and political economy and then overtakes the political altogether, becoming the matrix through which politics and culture are to be understood in recent decades. We will chart this journey at a propitious moment when the problematic assumptions of economics as a discipline have finally, if perhaps only momentarily, allowed alternatives to be heard in the form of Neo-Keynesianism, the return to Marx, Modern Monetary Theory, and much else since the 2007-8 and pandemic crises.
Each class focuses on distinct moments in the history of “economy,” beginning with its medieval foundations and culminating in the neoliberal present and the ruptures pointing the way to its demise. How did we get here? And how did economics—a field built on such weak philosophical assumptions and foundations—then colonize vast other fields (law, punishment, ethics, aesthetics, and so on) and be able to dictate and adjudicate not just public policy but ethics, aesthetics, and all else? Economics as a discipline, despite its undeniable power in adjudicating what’s deemed possible in the political and much else, is today facing an ongoing crisis, perhaps far greater than at any time since the appearance of Keynes’ work in the 1930s. The libertarian Chicago School of economics may not have described the world with any adequacy, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t helped create the world in which we have lived these past decades. Given the brevity of our time together, crucial fields in political economy and its history must be left for another time, including the work of Marx and his heirs, whose works are closely and well engaged in other MSCP classes. For each class, the lecturers will provide a loose lecture to cover the material, followed by ample time for discussion and textual questions.
Class 1: The Birth of Political Economy: From Scholasticism to Classical Economics
In the first class, we look at the origins of political economy, starting with the Scholastic tradition in medieval economic thought in Thomas Aquinas, which is in turn grounded in Aristotelean distinctions between natural and unnatural moneymaking. We then explore the transitions necessary to arrive at Adam Smith’s “founding” of “economic science” in The Wealth of Nations (1776), concentrating not just on the most-repeated moments (“the invisible hand”) but also those often ignored given its prescience for the horrors of industrial life (“the tedium” and inhumanity of conditions under specialized labor). We will then delve into the foundations of classical economics, focusing on the contributions of Smith, David Ricardo, and Jean-Baptiste Say, when the last vestiges of “moral philosophy” (each was considered in his time a “moral philosopher”) are dropped from economics as a discipline, though not politics.
Readings and recommended materials will be selections drawn Aquinas, Smith, and Bentham. The first class will also introduce the main contemporary areas of “economics” as a field.
Class 2: The Birth of a Discipline: From Marx to the Marginal Revolution to Keynes
The second class explores the transition from classical to neoclassical political economy and the emergence of the marginal revolution. We will discuss how the “marginalists,” who include William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras, shifted the focus of economic thought from objective theories of value to the subjective theories that were nevertheless given the sheen of objectivity through measures of value based on the concept of marginal utility. While breezing past debates about laissez-faire and interventionist approaches to the state, we will see how Keynes’s writings in the 1930s offer a place in economics for radical uncertainty, which needed to be banished from economics to bolster the fiction of homo economicus and the inexorability of its laws.
Readings and recommended materials will be selections drawn from Say, Marx, Jevons, and Marshal.
Class 3: The Emergence of Neoliberalism: Hayek (Austrian School) and Friedman (Monetarism)
The third class delves into the historical and intellectual context for the practices of neoliberalism, continuing our discussions of Keynes from last time and then moving to how his work was domesticated after World War II by the economics discipline (via econometrics and melding of Keynes with the neoclassical economics that cratered the economies of the world just two decades before), setting the stage for Milton Friedman’s monetarist neoliberal views, which snuffed out even the domesticated “liberal” form of Keynesianism on offer in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere while increased quantification of the field helped further its claims to be a science whose results were as solid as claims made in the natural sciences.
Readings and recommended materials will be selections drawn from Friedman and Becker.
Class 4: The Ascendancy of Neoliberalism: Political and Economic Transformations
In the fourth class, we examine Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures from 1978-9 and their interpretation by Wendy Brown several decades later, concentrating on how Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism shows how both liberalism and neoliberalism make use of market mechanisms as a means of governing populations. These mechanisms include the use of economic incentives and market competition to shape individual behavior and create a new subject, homo economicus, entrepreneurs, whose activities even in Joseph Schumpeter’s works are relatively limited but are now to be the modus vivendi of the neoliberal self. Reference will be made not only to Ordoliberals and Chicago School theories mentioned by Foucault and recent in the economics discipline then and since: behavioral economics, neo-institutionalism, evolutionary economics, and so forth. The point is not to cover any of these in any real depth, but to give class members better purchase in recent debates over the fate of “economics.”
Readings and recommended materials will be selections drawn from among the following in Foucault’s 1978-9 Birth of Biopower lectures and critiques and extensions of these lectures.
Class 5: Beyond Neoliberalism
The final class will focus on the legacy of neoliberalism and work through claims that the long twilight (may it go quicker than the century-old invocation of “late capitalism”) of neoliberal rationality has begun since it seems some days that it’s simply changing forms.
Readings and recommended materials will be selections drawn from Wendy Brown, Skidelsky, and on recent trends in heterodox economics.