"Nobody can separate the `internal' history of science from the `external' history of its allies. The former does not count as history at all. At best it is court historiography, at worst Legends of the Saints. The latter is not history of `science', it is history." (Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, p. 218.)
This class generally concerns the history of 20th century
economics, focusing attention on the development of the discipline as a
mainstream discourse in the
The seminar will meet once a week. There will be required material to be read each week. All required reading is in either a) the paperback The Ordinary Business of Life (OBL) by Backhouse, b) the paperback A History of Economic Theory (HET) by Niehans or c) e-reserve from the library. Some of the recommended material is to be found in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, in four large oversize volumes, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman. Duke owns three publicly accessible copies of this set of books, one each in the Fuqua and Law School Libraries, and one set in Perkins in the Reference Department. Please use these books at the table in Perkins where the books are shelved, and return them to their places immediately so that others may use them. Additionally, I have placed texts by Spiegel, by Beaud and Dosteller, and by Screpanti and Zamagni on reserve in the Perkins Reserve Room, on three hour closed reserve; some other materials are also on e-reserve.
Note that there is another excellent source for readings available on the
World Wide Web: Professor Roderick Hay made available non-copyrighted materials
in the history of economics at Readings
on the Web. I should also note that there is a fairly comprehensive,
although somewhat idiosyncratic, history of economics website maintained at the
Course Requirements: Each week each student will prepare a one to two page typed response to that week’s non-textbook readings, to be turned in during class. Those responses will be the basis for the seminar discussion. One student will be responsible for leading each week’s discussion, and that student should prepare from the auxiliary and background readings as well. 30% of each student’s course grade will be based on the weekly response papers, and participation in the seminar discussion. 10% of the student’s final grade will be based on the leadership of the class discussions (it is likely that each student will lead two discussions over the semester).
As befits a course with “R” and “W” designations, students will undertake a research project, which will result in a paper. Students are expected to work in pairs as part of a class project, producing short papers which will serve as sections/chapters of the longer final class project. Resources will include the Social Science Citation Index, JSTOR (the online searchable data base of economics journals), Silver Platter and other tools (including primary materials in the Economists’ Papers Project).
The focus of the course is the class project/paper. In Fall 2008 the
class project will be the construction a serious intellectual biography of Calvin Bryce Hoover, who was a founding professor of
I will work closely with you, functioning as your research director, to facilitate development of the project and the emerging paper. We will meet as necessary in tutorial sessions so that I may assess your progress and guide the work that remains to be done. These consultations will specifically involve working with you on successive drafts attending to the structure and argument and language, in short the rhetoric, of the paper as is appropriate for a course that carries the "writing" designation. Your attendance at the seminars and the tutorials is required.
The final paper will be turned in on the last day of
class.
Weekly discussions are based on common readings to be done by all class members (entries in The New Palgrave are in parentheses):
·
Week 1: Introduction
Required
·
Week 2: English
Economics Circa 1900
Required
·
Week 3: The Development of American Economics
Required Reading: Chapter 9 (OBL); William Baumol’s “On Method in U.S.
Economics a Century Earlier” American
Economic Review, 75 (6) 1985; Bradley Bateman’s "Clearing the Ground:
The Demise of the Social Gospel Movement and the Rise of Neoclassicism in
American Economics" in Mary Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford’s From
Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism (1998); Bradley Bateman’s
“Reflections on the Secularization of American Economics” (Duke Library
e-journal) Journal of the History of
Economic Thought 30, 1, March 2008. {Background
·
Week 4: Business Cycles
Required Reading: Required
·
Week 5: Keynes
and Revolution?
Required Reading: Chapter 15 of Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes, Volume 2;
"Chapter 4: Keynes General Theory, A Problem for Historians" of Peter
Clarke’s The Keynesian Revolution and its Economic Consequences; The
General Theory of Employment by J. M. Keynes:
{Background Reading: Don
Patinkin and J. Clark Leith (eds.) Keynes, Cambridge, and the General
Theory, 1978; J. M. Keynes, Collected Works, Vol. 13 (The General
Theory and After, Part 1, Preparation; (D.H. Robertson, Keynes, Keynes' General
Theory, Joan Robinson, Harrod, Hawtry)}
·
Week 6: General Equilibrium
Required
·
Week 7: Economics and World War II
Required Reading: Chapters 12 & 13, Backhouse (OBL); (handout) Chapter 4 of
Mirowski’s Machine Dreams. {Background
·
Week 8: The Neoclassical Synthesis
Required
·
Week 9: Game Theory
Required Reading: Philip Mirowski’s "What Were von Neumann and Morgenstern
Really Up To?"; and Robert Leonard’s, "Creating a Context For Game
Theory" in E. Roy Weintraub's Toward a History of Game Theory
(1991).{Background Reading: Philip Mirowski’s "When Games Grow Deadly
Serious" in Craufurd Goodwin's Economics and National Security;
Robert Leonard "From Parlor Games to Social Science" in Journal
of Economic Literature, 33, June 1995, pp.730-761. (neoclassical
synthesis, real balance effect, Borel,
game theory, Oskar
Morgenstern)}
·
Week 10: Neoliberalism
Required Reading: Backhouse’s “The Rise of Free Market Economics” in Medema and
Boettke’s The Role of Government in the
History of Economic Thought (2005) (handout); Van Horn and Mirowski’s
(unpublished) “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of
Neoliberalism” (2006) (handout)
·
Week 11:
Heterodoxies I: Post Keynesianism
Required Reading: Chapter 14, Backhouse (OBL); (handout) Chapter 6 & 7 in
J. E. King’s A History of Post Keynesian Macroeconomics.
·
Week 12: Heterodoxies II: Neo Austrianism
Required
· Week 13: Heterodoxies III: Anti-Economics
Last modified August 18, 2008