Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: Extended paper/take-home examination at end of course; take-home exam not adminstered by HLS.

All over the world, a series of debates about the economic arrangements of society have begun to shift the focus of controversy and to reshape our understanding of what distinguishes the left from the right, or progressives from conservatives. In these debates, the issue at stake is not simply the relation of the democratic state to the market economy; it is the kind of market order that we can and should seek to develop.

In today’s class societies and flawed democracies, a new vanguard of production has emerged: an insular knowledge economy that locks out most firms and condemns much of the labor force to precarious and unproductive make work. Meanwhile global restructuring of manufacturing and knowledge networks and new patterns of capital, natural resource, and human migration flows challenge conventional solutions like the resurgence of national industrial policy grounded in geopolitical competition. The power of capital and the evolution of technology together seem to deny us the prospect of replacing this knowledge economy for the few by a knowledge economy for the many. And the ideological misadventures of the twentieth century have discredited many of our transformative hopes.

Political Economy and Its Future is an attempt to explore the opportunities and the constraints of this moment. We set out on the exploration conscious that the established forms of economic and legal analysis are insufficient. We cannot achieve what we set out to accomplish without thinking both within and outside contemporary economics and legal thought.

Note: This course is jointly-listed with FAS as GOV 1025 and HKS as DEV-233.