Objects in My Calendar Are Closer than They Appear...
It's eight days before the start of classes, and the lecturer slot in Political Economy 101 here at Berkeley is still open.
So it is time for me to start thinking about how I would do the course if I wind up teaching it myself:
Political Economy 101: Introduction:
This is--at least the way those who designed the major thought of it, which is often very different from how things work on the ground--the last core course for the political economy major.
Political economy, at least as we here at Berkeley define it, is a group of four interlinked intellectual bets:
that the separation a century ago of the social sciences into walled, warring camps was--at least for undergraduates and at least for bird's-eye synthetic understanding--a mistake.
that there is, nevertheless, great value in the individual social sciences' analytical modes.
that there is even greater value in the classical social theory tradition--that set of thinkers from Nicky Machiavelli to Barry Moore who we retrospectively identify as grappling for the first time how a modern human society--one not dominated by louse-riddem thugs with spears and perfumed thugs with styluses, and composed overwhelmingly of malnourished peasants living and dying early in the small villages in which they were born--actually worked.
that there is great value in studying the nineteenth and early twentieth-century history of western Europe and North America: Charlie Marx was wrong in claiming that the "more advanced" shows the "less advanced" the image of its own future, but they do provide a very useful set of benchmarks, yardsticks, and comparisons.
Now that was a mindful. Catch your breath and think about that for a while.
This course--this last core course--is supposed to be the payoff. This is where we cash in our winning intellectual bets, tie all the threads together, and come up with running code for a rough-and-ready framework for thinking about everything that happens at the crossroads where history and politics meet economies and sociologies in a world where village elders along the Zambezi lecture the principal deputy managing director of the Imternational Monetary Fund on the implications of the Republican convention.
However, each version of Political Economy 101 is different. We agree that these are winning intellectual bets. We do not agree on what the winnings are. My version of PE 101 is different from Bev Crawford's or Alan Karras's or Dariush Zahedi's. This is, I think, a constructive tension.
This is my version...