Reading Group
Meeting every other week or so this fall term, the Beyond Liquidity Reading Group will read classics of economic thought while attending to their rhetorical force and sociohistorical import. The interdisciplinary group welcomes graduate student and faculty participants. Please contact Brad Pasanek (bmp7e) to be added to the email list or use this site’s RSS feed to stay abreast of announcements.
Meetings are currently scheduled for 6 PM on Monday evenings in the English Department Faculty Lounge, 2nd Floor, Bryan Hall.
A rough draft of reading assignments and suggestions appears below. Future readings that are protected by copyright may be stored behind a firewall on a UVa Collab worksite.
| August 31 | From Mercantilism to Capitalism |
| “Of Money,” “Of Interest,” “Of the Balance of Trade,” and “Of Public Credit,” from David Hume’s Essays (1777) Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, chapters iii-vii |
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| September 7 | Paper Money and the Colonies |
| Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book II, chapters ii, iv, Book IV, chapters i, vii (esp. part iii) Recommended: A. Mitchell Innes, “What is Money?” (1913) |
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| September 14 | The State and Credit-Centered Critique |
| A. Mitchell Innes, “The Credit Theory of Money” John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, Vol. I, Chapter 1, “The Classification of Money” |
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| September 21 | Sociology of Money |
| Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907), Chapter 2 (skim) and Chapter 6 | |
| September 28 | Capital and Labor |
| Review Wealth of Nations. Book I, chapters v-vii (”Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities, or of their Price in Labour, and their Price in Money,” “Of the Component Parts of the Price of Commodities,” and “Of the Natural and Market Price of Commodities”), and Book II, Chapter iii (”Of the Accumulation of Capital”). | |
| October 12 | The Money Form and Commodities |
| Karl Marx, Capital (1867), preface to first edition, Vol I, Part I, Chapter i (”The Commodity”) | |
| October 19 | Circulation |
| Marx, Capital, Vol I, Part 1, Chapter iii (”Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”) | |
| October | The Quantity Theory |
| Milton Friedman, “A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability,” American Economic Review (1948) and Karl Menger, “On the Origins of Money” (1948) |
To Be Scheduled:
Viviane Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money (1994)
From Frank Knight, Risk Uncertainty and Profit (1921)
Julian Hoppit’s “Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700-1800″
Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic
Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital
Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population
Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
Philip Mirowski, from More Heat than Light: Economics and Social Physics