"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 particular attention on 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 Backhouse’s The Ordinary Business of Life or b) e-reserve from the library; or on Blackboard. 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. There are no really reliable textbooks on 20th century economic thought.
Note that there is another excellent source for readings available on the
World Wide Web: there are 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
All students will keep a journal that will be a journal of responses to the reading, and questions which are raised by the readings which seem to merit class discussion. This journal is not notes on the reading but rather your response to the reading. I will collect these journals at the end of the semester.
For graduate students, the focus on the course is the reading, and the class discussions. I will moreover help shape individual projects, suited for the various graduate programs of the students, as appropriate.
Weekly discussions are based on common readings to be done by all class members for the specific class session (entries in are in parentheses): Weekly discussions are based on common readings to be done by all class members for the specific class session:
Week 1.
First Class
Meeting. Information session; discussion
of class project, reading responses, class resources, etc.
Week 2. Historiography. Required Reading: Prologue, in Backhouse (OBL); Weintraub’s “How Should We Write the History of 20th Century Economics?” (Blackboard Course Document). {Background Reading: Chap 16, "A Methodological Postscript" in Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (3rd ed.); E. R. Weintraub, Chaps. 1, 8 in Stabilizing Dynamics, 1991; Additional Reading can be found in the collection of papers put together by Mark Blaug, The Historiography of Economics (1991).
Week 3. English Economic Thought Circa 1900. Required Reading: Chapter 8 (OBL); Chap 9, "Economic Orthodoxies", in Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1986 (e-reserve). {Background Reading: Chap 2, "Cambridge Civilisation", in Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1986; Chap 8, "The Marginal Revolution" in Mark Blaug; Chap 4, "Leon Walras" in Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel, The Invisible Hand, 1990.}
Week 4. The Development of American Economics. Required Reading: Chapter 9 (OBL); 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) (e-reserve); Malcolm Rutherford’s “American Institutional Economics in the Interwar Period” in Samuels, Biddle, and Davis’s A Companion to the History of Economic Thought (2003) (Blackboard Course Document). {Background Reading: "Marginalism and Historicism in Economics: Chapter 6" of Dorothy Ross’s The Origins of American Social Science (1991) (e-reserve); 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; William Baumol’s “On Method in U.S. Economics a Century Earlier” American Economic Review, 75 (6) 1985}
Week 5. Business Cycles. Required Reading: Chapter 10 (OBL); Chapters 2 & 3 in Mary S. Morgan’s The History of Econometric Ideas (1990). (e-reserve) {Background Reading: (business cycles); Judy L. Klein’s Statistical Visions in Time (1997); Kyun Kim’s Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory (1988}.
Week 6. Keynes and Revolution? Required Reading: Chapter 15 of Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes, Volume 2 (e-reserve); Chapter 7 of Francesco Louça’s The Years of High Econometrics (Blackboard course document); The General Theory of Employment by J. M. Keynes: {Background Reading: J. M. Keynes, Collected Works, Vol. 13 (The General Theory and After, Part 1, Preparation.}
Week 7. General Equilibrium and The Neoclassical Synthesis. Required Reading: Chapter 11 (OBL); Chapter 6 in Weintraub’s General Equilibrium Analysis: Studies in Appraisal, 1985, (e-reserve); Chapter 4 of E. R. Weintraub’s Microfoundations (1979) (Blackboard Course Document) {Background Reading: Ingrao and Israel, Chap 7.}
Week 8. Economics and World War II. Required Reading: Chapters 13, Backhouse (OBL); Leonard, Chaps 12-13 of Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory (Blackboard Course Document){Background Reading: Andrew Pickering’s "Cyborg History and the WWII Regime" in Perspectives on Science, 3, 1995, pp.1-45.}
Week 9. The Modern Economist: Engineer or Expert? Required Reading: Mary Morgan’s “Economics” in Porter’s and Ross’ Cambridge History of Science Volume 7 (e-reserve); and Chapter 6 of Michael Bernstein’s A Perilous Progress (e-reserve).
Week 10. The Economics Profession in the U.S., Britain, and France. Required Reading: Chapters 1 and 2 of Marion Fourcade’s Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France 1890s to 1990s (2009) (Blackboard Course Document)).
Week 11. Economics among the Social Sciences. Required Reading: Backhouse and Fontaine’s “Introduction: Contexts of Postwar Social Science” (Blackboard Course Document).
Week 12. 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) (Blackboard Course Document).
Week 13. Heterodoxies. Required Reading: Chapter 14, Backhouse (OBL); Bruce Caldwell on “Hayek” (Blackboard Course Document); (handout) Chapter 6 & 7 in J. E. King’s A History of Post Keynesian Macroeconomics. {Background Reading: Chapters 5-6 of Karen I. Vaughn’s Austrian Economics in America (1994).}
Week 14. Tutorials on Final Paper
Last modified August 4, 2010