Session 1
Session 1. Introduction to the Course: (1) The Market System as a Structure of Social Organization. (2) Varieties of Market System: Capitalism, Mercantilism, Market Socialism, Market Cooperativism, Worker-Owned Capitalism. (3) Overview of Capitalism’s Virtues and Vices. (4) Property and Its Varieties: Private Property, Common Property, Collective Property, Corporate Property. (5) Goods and Their Varieties: Private Goods, Common Goods, Public Goods, Club Goods.
Suggested reading: Charles Lindblom, "Market System Ascendant," The Market System, pp. 1-15.
Other suggested reading: Jeremy Waldron, "Property and Ownership: Issues of Analysis and Definition," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/#1.
Distinguishes private property, a core feature of capitalism, from two other property systems: common property and collective property.
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Maurice Dobb, "Capitalism," Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1946), pp. 1-32.
Tackles the tricky question of how to define capitalism so that we don’t end up saying that it was rampant in
ancient Egypt. Points out that it requires more than commerce: also requires a relatively free labor market
and wage labor.
Jeremy Waldron, "Property and Ownership," entire. [Go to: plato.stanford.edu/entries/property]
Considers the leading justifications of private property.
Jeffrey Frieden, "The Modern Capitalist World-Economy: A Historical Overview," Oxford Handbook of Capitalism, pp. 17-37.
[ClassesV2]
Largely celebratory history of the development of capitalism to 2010. Good on the transition from mercantilism to industrial capitalism. Tends to conflate capitalism with commerce.
Branko Milanovic, "The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know It," World Development 31 (2003): 667-683
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Reminds us that the creation of the global capitalist economy was effected by conquest, enslavement, massacre,
pillage, colonialism, and domination; as well as by voluntary exchanges. Supporters of globalization tend to extol the
period from 1870 to 1913, but, the article points out, that was when globalization was occurring thanks to the violent
methods mentioned above.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, pp. 139-142. [ClassesV2]
Hypothesizes that the era of behemoth corporations in monopolistic competition and controlled by technocratic managers and dispersed shareholders has created a fourth type of property regime: neither private, nor common, nor collective, but corporate. If so, then given that publicly-traded corporations are by far the most important players in the rich economies of the 20th and 21st centuries, then it seems that we should not say that all capitalist systems center on private property in the means of production. In fact, 20th- and 21st-century capitalism seems to center on corporate property in the means of production.