Courses

Duke offers a rich variety of graduate level courses* in the history of political economy and related fields during the regular academic year. A list of recently offered courses may be found below. Visitors to the Center who may wish to sit in on a course are welcome to do so, but should contact the professor ahead of time to check on space availability and expectations regarding participation.

(*Graduate level courses at Duke are numbered 200 and higher; undergraduate courses are numbered 0 through 199. Many of the lower numbered courses enroll both graduate students and undergraduates.  Those who wish more information on applying to the undergraduate or graduate programs at Duke should consult Academic Program.)

ECO 49 S.01 –  John Maynard Keynes. This First Year Seminar will examine the life and work of one of the truly important figures of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes. The context of the development of Keynes's thought in late Victorian Cambridge, and the influence of Moore and the Apostles, sets the stage for an examination of Keynes's emerging role as government advisor, journalist, teacher, and economist. The seminar will study his connections to the Bloomsbury Group as well as his non-economic writings, both political and biographical. The emergent focus will be Keynes's influential General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, its intellectual background, and its consequences. E. Roy Weintraub.

ECO 146 – Adam Smith and the System of Natural Liberty. The writings of Adam Smith, including close readings of The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and selections from Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Quesnay, Turgot, and Bentham. Focus on eighteenth-century views on the nature of society and the origins of prosperity, the luxury debate, and links between natural philosophy (including medical thought), and moral philosophy. Neil De Marchi

ECO 150 – The Uses of Economics. The various ways economics is used in contemporary society: in the scholarly community, government, private sector, civil society, other disciplines, and popular culture. Readings in original texts and interpretative commentaries. Craufurd Goodwin

ECO 171 - Hayek and the Austrian Tradition.  Fundamental writings in the Austrian tradition will be explored, with an emphasis on the writings of the Nobel laureate economist and social philosopher F.A. Hayek. Bruce Caldwell

ECO 196 – Economics and the Bloomsbury Group. We will examine economics in society by exploring in depth the place of this discipline in the affairs of the Bloomsbury Group, a remarkable association of artists and intellectuals whose lives spanned the first half of the 20th Century. The best-known central figures were Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Desmond McCarthy, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry. Keynes was probably the most important economist of the century and the father of macroeconomics. Roger Fry wrote extensively on the art market, and Leonard Woolf was a leading Fabian Socialist concerned about imperialism and the institutions of the world economy.

      Economic ideas were sprinkled widely throughout the Bloomsbury Group's output: in the creative writings of Virginia Woolf and Forster, in the essays of Clive Bell and Desmond McCarthy, even in the works of art. Students in the seminar will have to come to grips with economics as an influential discipline in society. This will be a chance to see how the subject looks when embedded in the humanities and the arts as well as in politics. We will ask: What are the interactions, the tensions, the potential complementarity of economics with other subjects? Craufurd Goodwin

ECO 200CS. Economics, Society, and Morality in 18th Century Thought.  Explorations of eighteenth-century topics with a modern counterpart, chiefly (a) self-interest, liberal society, and economic incentive; and (b) the passions, sociality, civic virtue, common moral sensibilities, and the formation of taste and opinion. Original texts: for example, Bacon, Newton, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Hogarth, Burke, Cato's Letters, Federalist Papers, Jane Austen. Stress on integrating economic and political science perspectives. Neil De Marchi and Ruth Grant (Political Science).

ECO 237 – The Philosophy and Methodology of Economics.  Economic methodology and the philosophy of science with a focus on its applications to economics.  Includes classic contributions of economists and philosophers as well as a variety of recent topics at the intersection of philosophy and economics, such as models, causality, reductionism, and realism. Kevin Hoover.

ECO 248 – History of Economic Thought: Approaches to economic problems from Aristotle to Keynes, emphasizing certain models and doctrines—their origins, relevance, and evolution. Readings from Mun, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Walras, Veblen, and Keynes. Craufurd Goodwin.

ECO 264 – History of Modern Macroeconomics: From Keynes to the Present: How did modern macroeconomics come to be? An examination of some of the key developments in macroeconomics from the 1930s through the 1980s. Case studies of the evolution of macroeconomics in political and social context. Topics include the theory of unemployment in the Great Depression; growth theory and the rise of business cycle modeling in the aftermath of World War II; the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment in the 1950s and ‘60s; the debate over monetarism in the age of stagflation; and the rise of the New Classical Macroeconomics in its aftermath. Kevin Hoover. [syllabus link]

ECO 290S(190S) – The Development of Modern Economic Thought. Selective survey of the development of economic thinking in the twentieth century, with emphasis on the construction of economics as a science. E. Roy Weintraub.

ECO 297S(197S). Economic Science Studies.  Links between science and technology studies and problems in the history, philosophy, methodology, anthropology, sociology, and rhetoric of economics. Examination of questions like What counts as ''fact'' in economics? Who decides, and by what processes of negotiation? How gendered is economics? Naming, constructing and representing the economy. Issues of objectivity, performativity, and quantification in economics. Close readings of a variety of texts in Science Studies and Economic Science Studies. E. Roy Weintraub.