Entry requirements

A Bachelor's degree, equivalent to a Swedish kandidatexamen, from an internationally recognised university.

Learning outcomes

Upon completing the course, the students are expected to:

• account critically for the variety of historical market notions across time and space, with a particular focus on the 20th century
• have read and understood a set of key classical texts pertaining to the history of the idea of the market
• be able to describe the meaning of Market as political category and metaphor for social life
• demonstrate knowledge of foundational market concepts from classical to the neoclassical and neoliberal canon
• apply theoretical notions to the market as artefact and system of calculation and information and creatively analyze the role of market devices in contemporary societies.

Content

This master level course introduces students to the historical constitution of the market as an economic, cultural, political and ideational category. Markets were once physical meeting spaces and ornate buildings. Today, markets are metaphors for forms of social life. The Market in its singular form is both a supreme ideological construct and a meta signifier for capitalist organization. In this course, we provide a baseline for thinking the intellectual history of the Market as category and idea. We are interested in how notions of the Market grew from the classical doctrine of economic ideas and moral political economy. As these circulated across global space, we ask how ideas of moral market order and the good of exchange transformed into formalized reasonings on prices and value. We discuss the 20th century idea of economic expansion, and the development of Market as global metaphor. We reconsider  the history of market thinking after 1970 in the light of environmental critique and developmentalist ideas. Finally, we consider the Market as a collection of devices for calculation, valuation and information in contemporary capitalist societies.

The course is of interest for students at the master and doctoral level in the humanities and social science faculties, interested in global intellectual history, the history of economic thought, in political economy, and in the sociology of science and STS.

Instruction

The language of instruction is English. The course consists of compulsory seminars and lectures.

Assessment

Assessment will be based upon written and oral assignments.