skroen@history.ufl.edu
Office
hours: M,
Description: In this course we will read a mixture of primary and secondary sources that will enable us to explore the cultural history of capitalism since the early modern period. Primary sources include seminal writings in political economy (by John Locke, Adam Smith, Karl Marx), in sociology (by Max Weber), and in anthropology (by Karl Polanyi), as well as novels (by Daniel Defoe and Jules Verne), films (from the Marshall Plan era), and political writings during the postwar economic recovery (by T.H. Marshall, Ludwig Erhard, Jean Fourastié, Stanley Hoffmann, W. W. Rostow). Secondary readings offer different approaches to a cultural history of capitalism, highlighting in particular the use of political economy, fiction, and great exhibitions, and a cultural history of practices (in the theater, around credit, in relation to consumption).
Requirements: Students are expected to participate actively in seminar. To facilitate this process, students will write 1-page reviews of each week’s reading. In addition each student will co-lead a seminar twice during the semester. This task involves: 1) developing a brief, 1-2 page bibliography on a suggested topic related to the week’s reading, to be handed out to fellow students; 2) reading one additional book from this bibliography and writing a one-page review of the book, and discussing this book as part of the week’s in-class presentation; 3) opening up the seminar discussion with a few critical questions raised by the readings. In addition to this regular preparation for class discussion, students are expected to write three papers integrating the semester’s readings: 1) a paper of 7-10 pages (due on October 15th) on the cultural history of early capitalism; 2) a paper of 7-10 pages (due on November 13th) on the nineteenth century; 3) a paper of 7-10 pages (due on December 5th) on the cultural history of capitalism, more broadly, from the perspective of the twentieth century.
Required
Available for purchase at Gatortextbooks:
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: The Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library edition preferred)
Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Karl Marx, Capital (Penguin edition preferred)
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)
Jules Verne, Mysterious Island
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, orig. 1944)
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century
Please do not hesitate to contact the instructor during the semester if you have any individual concerns or issues that need to be discussed. Students requesting classroom accommodation must first register with the Dean of Students Office (www.dso.ufl.edu/drp/). The Dean of Students Office will provide documentation to the student who must then provide this documentation to the instructor when requesting accommodation.
In writing papers, be certain to give proper credit whenever you use words, phrases, ideas, arguments, and conclusions drawn from someone else’s work. Failure to give credit by quoting and/or footnoting is PLAGIARISM and is unacceptable. Please review the University’s honesty policy at www.dso.ufl.edu/judicial/.
Student records are confidential. UF views
each student, not their parent(s), as
the primary contact for all communication. For more information, see:
www.registrar.ufl.edu/ferpahub.html.
August 29:
Introduction
In class exercise: capitalism as a
historical problem
September 5:
Adaptations to market culture in medieval and
early
modern
Europe
Reading:
Martha Howell, “Introduction: Commerce Before Capitalism: European Market Culture, 1300-1600,” chapter 1, “” unpublished mss.
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), entire.
Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III,
“Introduction,” The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays
(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1-42.
Reading:
John Locke, excerpts from Two Treatises on Government and other primary docs
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: The Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) entire.
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, chapters 2, “Landscape and Patchwork,” 19-33; 4, “Bounding the Land,” 54-81; and 8, “That Wilderness Should Turn a Mart,” 159-170.
Richard Drayton, “The Collaboration of Labor: Slaves, Empires, and Globalizations in the Atlantic World, ca. 1600-1850,” in Globalization in World History, Ed. A.G. Hopkins (NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 2002), pp. 99-115.
September 19:
Novels: Heros, Heroines, and
Capitalist Subjectivities
Reading:
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, entire.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, chapter on Defoe.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, chapter 2, “The Rise of the Domestic Woman,” pp. 59-94.
Joyce Appleby, “New Cultural heroes in the early national period,” in Haskell and Teichgraeber, The Culture of the Market, pp. 163-188.
Reading:
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, selections (see handout)
Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Reading:
Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery (1713-1833), selected chapters
Margot Finn, chapters 1, “Fictions of debt and credit, 1740-1914,” 25-63; and 6, ‘From courts of conscience to county courts: small-claims litigation in the nineteenth century,” 236-277, and conclusion, 317-327, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
October 10: NO CLASS
Work on papers, due Monday, October 15th
MONDAY, OCTOBER 15th:
First paper due
October 17:
Nineteenth-Century Vistas
Reading:
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Karl Marx, Capital, selections, see handout.
October 24:
Spectacles
of Capitalism (Great Exhibitions, Department Stores)
Reading:
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, selected sections
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England; Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), chapter 1, “The Great Exhibition of Things,” 1-72.
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (NY: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 219-248. The Crystal Palace through Russian eyes.
Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), chapter 3, “Dream World of Mass Consumption,” pp. 58-106. Exhibition of 1900.
Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), chapter V, “Selling Consumption,” pp. 165-189.
October 31:
The Birth of the Modern
Industrial Subject?
Reading:
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, selected sections
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), all but chapter 6.
November 7:
Cyrus Harding: A late imperial
Robinson Crusoe?
Reading:
Jules Verne, Mysterious Island
Tuesday, November 13:
Second Paper due
Reading:
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, orig. 1944).
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, chapters 4, “The Crisis of Capitalism”, 104-137; 6, “Blueprints for the Golden Age,” 182-211; chapter 9, “Democracy Transformed: Western Europe, 1950-75,” 286-326; chapter 10, “The Social Contract in Crisis,” 327-360.
Reading:
Choose one of the following 3:
T.H. Marshall, Social Citizenship (England); Jean Fourastié, Trente Glorieuses (France); Erhard Prosperity through Competition (Germany)
All read excerpts from:
Paul Hoffmann, Freedom from Want
and
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
All read:
WW Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (1961), excerpts
Gilbert Rist, Introduction, 1-7; Chapter 6, “Modernization Posed between History and Prophecy,” 93-108; Chapter 12, “The Postmodern Illusion: Globalization as Simulacrum of ‘Development’,” 211-237; The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London: Zed Books, 1997), translated by Patrick Camiller.
MP show and tell: films, and presentation of MP propaganda
Kroen manuscript
Additional reading to be determined in consultation with the class:
Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana Wolf
József Böröcz and Melinda
Kovács, ed., Empire’s New
Clothes: Unveiling EU Enlargement, Central Europe Review
Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration, chapter on Euro
Fukuyama, “The End of History”
Emma Rothschild article
Various readings on globalization
December 5:
Final Paper due, no class