11.409 | Spring 2020 | Graduate

Institutions of Modern Capitalism

Calendar

For full details of the readings listed below, see the Bibliography page. From among the weeks when reading responses are due, students select two weeks’ readings to respond to; for descriptions of that assignment and the final paper assignment, see the Assignments page.

WEEKs Readings DUE DATES
1. Introduction and Course Overview

  • “The 1619 Project”
  • Fraser, “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden”
  • Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?”
  • Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy (video)

Optional:

  • Coates, “The Case for Reparations”
  • Krugman, “Why We Are in a New Gilded Age” 

 

I. Foundations: Conceptualizing Capitalism

2. Historicizing Capitalism: Race and the New History of Capitalism

  • Beckert, “Building War Capitalism”
  • Beckert and Desan, American Capitalism, introduction
  • Girvan, “Aspects of the Political Economy of Race,” pp. 1–34
  • Robinson, Black Marxism, chapter 1

Optional:

Classics

  • Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America
  • James, The Black Jacobins
  • Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, pp. 51–84

Contemporary

  • Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, Introduction
  • Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight”
  • “Economies of Dispossession”
  • Fraser, “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism”
  • Johnson, River of Dark Dreams
  • Rosenthal, “From Memory to Mastery”

 
3. The Rise of “Market Society”

  • Hirschman, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society”
  • Marx, “The German Ideology”
  • Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,” pp. 76–94

Optional:

  • Dobbin, “How Institutional Economics is Killing Micro-Economics”

Reading responses due
4. Markets Good, or Markets Bad? Champions and Critics

  • Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, Introduction and chapters 1-2
  • Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order
  • Polanyi, The Great Transformation, chapters 1–2, 4, and 5 (pp. 59–60)
  • Posner and Weyl, “Property is Monopoly” in Radical Markets
  • Somers and Block, “From Poverty to Perversity”

Optional:

  • Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, chapter 7
  • Hayek, “Economics and Knowledge”
  • Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”
  • Hicks, “Free Market and Religious Fundamentalists versus Poor Relief”
  • Marx, “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”
  • Polanyi, “Our Obsolete Market Mentality”
  • Posner and Weyl, Radical Markets, introduction
  • Somers and Block, “A Reply to Hicks”

Reading responses due

II. Capitalist Governance: Theories of States and Markets

5. The State

  • Dobbin, “Why the Economy Reflects the Polity”
  • Mitchell, “State, Economy and the State Effect”
  • Scott, Seeing Like a State, introduction
  • Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back”

Optional:

  • Brenner, “Globalization as Reterritorialization”
  • Brenner and Ibanez, “Globalization as Reterritorialization” (video)
  • Chibber, Locked in Place
  • Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy, chapter 1
  • Ferguson, “Seeing like an Oil Company”
  • Fligstein, “State Building and Market Building” in The Architecture of Markets
  • Fourcade, “State Metrology”
  • Gupta, Red Tape
  • Hall, “Policy Paradigm, Social Learning and the State”
  • Katznelson, Fear Itself
  • Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy”
  • Morgan and Orloff, The Many Hands of the State, introduction
  • Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States

Reading responses due
6. Postcolonialism (Postcolonial Capitalism)

  • Birla, “Jurisprudence of Emergence”
  • Birla, Stages of Capital, introduction
  • Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj”
  • Mitchell, Rule of Experts, introduction and chapter 1

Optional:

  • Go, “Race, Empire and Epistemic Exclusion”
  • Irani, Chasing Innovation
  • Lenin, “Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism”
  • Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Reading responses due
7. Platform Capitalism

  • Posner and Weyl, “Data as Labor” in Radical Markets
  • Rahman and Thelen, “Broken Contract”
  • Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
  • Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism”

Optional:

  • Fitzmaurice et al., “Domesticating the Market”
  • Mozorov, “Capitalism’s New Clothes”

Reading responses due

III. Techniques and Technologies of Capitalist Governance

8. Neoliberalism (Neoliberal Capitalism)

  • Block and Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism, chapter 1
  • Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, chapters 1–2
  • Maclean interview (video)
  • Slobodian podcast (audio)
  • Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe, chapter 1

Optional:

Theorizing and Defining Neoliberalism

  • Ferguson, “Uses of Neoliberalism”
  • Foucault, “On Governmentality”
  • Foucault, Security, Territory, Population pp. 12–23
  • Gordon, “Governmental Rationality”
  • Harcourt, “Neoliberal Penality”

Neoliberalism as a Political Project

  • Campbell and Pedersen, “Policy Ideas, Knowledge Regimes and Comparative Political Economy”
  • Campbell and Pedersen, The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis, chapter 1
  • Maclean, Democracy in Chains
  • Mirowski, “Shock Block Doctrine”
  • Plehwe, introduction to Mirowski and Plehwe, Road from Mont Pèlerin
  • Slobodian, Globalists

Effects of Neoliberalism

  • Brenner et al., “Variegated Neoliberalization”
  • Fourcade and Healy, “Classification Situations”
  • Gereffi, “The Global Economy”
  • Hall and Soskice, “An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism”

Reading responses due
9. Informal Markets, Illicit Markets, Illegal Markets

  • Fourcade and Healy, “Moral Views of Market Society”
  • Halley, “Conclusion: Distribution and Decision”

Informal Markets

  • Rittich, “Formality and Informality in the Law of Work”
  • Roy, “Urban Informality”

Illicit Markets

  • Ahmed and Jackson, “Sex, Markets and Political Economy”
  • Almeling, Sex Cells, chapter 1

Illegal Markets

  • Barsukova and Radaev, “Informal Economy in Russia”
  • Santos, “The War on Drugs and the Challenges to Liberal Legality”

Optional:

Informality

  • Castells and Portes, “World Underneath”
  • Portes and Haller, “The Informal Economy”
  • Roy, “Urban Informality”
  • Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities”
  • Sassen, “The Informal Economy”
  • Song, “Planning with Urban Informality”

Morals and Markets

  • Almeling, “Selling Genes, Selling Gender”
  • Anteby, “Markets, Morals, and Practices of Trade”
  • Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’
  • Chan, “Creating a Market in the Presence of Cultural Resistance”
  • Cohen and Jackson, “Moral Technologies of Market Construction”
  • Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners
  • Healy, Last Best Gifts
  • Livne, “Economies of Dying”
  • Quinn, “The Transformation of Morals in Markets”
  • Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy
  • Zelizer, “Human Values and the Market”

Reading responses due
10. Global Capitalism as Gendered Capitalism, or Gender and Globality

  • Hoang, Dealing in Desire, chapters 1–3
  • Matlon, “Racial Capitalism and the Crisis of Black Masculinity”
  • Roy, “Subjects of Risk”

Optional:

  • Roy, Poverty Capital

Reading responses due
11. Algorithmic Governance (guest speaker Anush Kapadia, IIT Bombay)

  • Benjamin, Race after Technology
  • Gillespie, “Algorithm”
  • O’Neal, Weapons of Math Destruction
  • Pasquale, Black Box Society
  • Ziewitz, “Governing Algorithms”
  • Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism”

Background on Algorithms

  • “A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning”

Optional:

  • Benjamin, “Introduction: Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination”
  • Burrell, “How the Machine Thinks”
  • Fourcade and Healy, “Classification Situations”
  • Fourcade and Healy, “Seeing like a Market”
  • Kitchin, “Thinking Critically about and Researching Algorithms”
  • Rosenblat, Uberland
  • Seaver “Knowing Algorithms”

Reading responses due

IV. Capitalism and Futurity

12. The Politics of Socio-technical Imaginaries

  • Jasanoff, “Future Imperfect”
  • SASE Winter 2018 Newsletter
  • Turner, “Burning Man at Google”

Optional:

  • Beckert, “Imagined Futures”

Reading responses due
13. Whither the Future of Market Society? Student Proposals and Projects

  • Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 3–27 and
    57–64

Final papers/projects due

Course Info

Instructor
As Taught In
Spring 2020
Level
Learning Resource Types
Written Assignments