PRINTA three-week institute for twenty-five college and university faculty on the history of economic thought.
Bruce Caldwell, professor of economics and director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University, leads an institute to explore various episodes in the development of the history of economic thought. This program is a response "to the fact that the history of economic thought is disappearing as a subject within American economics departments," Caldwell writes, and the Center for the History of Political Economy was established at Duke "with a mission of promoting and supporting research in, and the teaching of, the history of political economy." The institute seeks to reveal "the roots of economic knowledge in humanistic understanding of social life." The proposal argues that "economics developed over the centuries through people who did not see themselves as 'economists,' but as scholars trying to make sense of the social universe in the same way that natural philosophers were trying to make sense of the natural world." The institute be organized around weekly themes. Week one begins with readings and understandings of key texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with emphasis on David Hume and Adam Smith. Week two revolves around Marx, Engels, and socialism, and the Marginal Revolution. Week three shifts to the role of the state in twentieth-century economy and focuses on the idea of market failure. Bruce Caldwell, Brad Bateman (Denison University), and Steve Medema (University of Colorado, Denver) lead discussions on John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and Ronald Coase. The roster of visiting lecturers also includes Ryan Hanley (Marquette University), Malcolm Rutherford (Victoria University, British Columbia), Carl Wennerlind (Columbia University), Craufurd Goodwin, E. Roy Weintraub (both from Duke University), and Bilge Erten (Columbia University). The institute reading list includes Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Essay Concerning the Principles of Moral, and Political Discourses; Smith, The Wealth of Nations; Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy; Keynes, "The End of Laissez Faire"; Coase, "The Problem of Social Cost"; and Hayek, The Market and Other Orders.
Faculty: Bradley Bateman, Bilge Erten, Craufurd Goodwin, Ryan Hanley, Tim Leonard, Steven Medema, Malcolm Rutherford, E. Roy Weintraub, Carl Wennerlind