Smith (Adam) Archives - Public Seminar

Economy

The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville

Do poor Americans have too much?

September 27, 2022 • by David Lay Williams

According to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Phil Gramm and John Early, the problem is not that the wealthiest Americans have seen their fortunes dramatically explode. It is rather that the poorest Americans have too much! ...

The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville

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Rethinking Capitalism: Class 3

February 13, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

I think there are two great questions to take away from Nancy Fraser’s approach to understanding capitalism, one small and one large. The smaller one concerns the analogy between feudalism and capitalism. This was not discussed last night but it seems to me important. Both belong to the same set ...

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Rethinking Capitalism: Class 2

February 11, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

The second class had what I regard as a pellucid account of capitalism from Duncan Foley. The main points that I took away from it are: 1) Capitalism has to be seen as a quasi-natural form of social organization, which is rooted in the division of labor. The key point of ...

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Classical Sociology and the Social Condition

February 8, 2015 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

In last week’s meeting of the social condition class, we reviewed classical sociological studies, considering how they reveal or conceal the dilemmas and tensions built into the social fabric, how they illuminate or obfuscate the social condition. We looked closely at the closing pages of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethnic and ...

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Rethinking Capitalism

February 4, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

Capitalism, by its nature, cannot be understood through the lens of any one discipline. Most importantly, it is not fully comprehensible by economics; there is no such thing as an economic theory of capitalism. Philosophy is important, for example to understand the moral standing of capitalism, but it is scarcely ...

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Are We Really Such Beasts?

August 22, 2014 • by Hakan Altinay

There is a relentless barrage of narratives about our supposed beastly nature and conduct. Since childhood, we have all watched animals routinely tear off each others' limbs in countless nature documentaries meant to show us that survival at any cost is the natural order of life. We are fascinated by House ...

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