Some suggested topics for a syllabus on the economy
Draft: Roby Rajan (May 2005)

SECTION I

1. Today we take for granted the existence of something we call "the economy" but this has not always been so. How and when did "the economy" emerge as an autonomous domain that could be studied almost entirely with reference to laws and tendencies internal to it?

2. What kinds of separations did this entail - for instance, from ethics, from religion, from politics, from art? How did these come to constitute themselves as distinct spheres of value and what was the relationship between these value spheres?

3. What picture of human being starts to emerge from these developments? What is the idea of "rationality" that starts to become dominant? What distinguishes human beings from one another in this picture? How does the separation of "production" and "consumption" as two distinct kinds of activities alter the way people began to think of their work and leisure? What concept of human well-being is operating here? In what way is this picture different from earlier worldviews?

4. What is the relationship between what is starting to happen in the new discipline of economics and roughly contemporaneous developments in other disciplines, especially physics and biology? How does economics borrow and adapt methodologies and ideas from these disciplines (e.g. that of universal laws that govern self-regulating systems or the principles that govern scarcity, competition, and survival of the fittest)? How does increasing mathematization set in and how is this related to the idea of a hard science? What has this meant about how it has handled questions of ethics? What effects has this had on the other social sciences?

5. What were the changes that started occurring in the social institutions within which human beings carried out their economic activities? How did these lead to the rise of the predominant form of modern economic activity - the corporation? What is the relationship between this and other institutions such as that of the nation-state? And what in turn links these to the current regime of global governance? How does the idea of "development" tie all these institutions together? Are there significant differences between modern-day globalization and pre-modern forms of trade and inter-civilizational encounter?

6. Who were some of the early critics of the separation of economy from other social concerns and what were their criticisms? What can we make of such criticisms in retrospect?

7. Who are some of the most important 20th century critics of economics and of the idea of the economy as a separate domain? What was the basis of their criticisms? Would it be appropriate to draw a distinction between "internal" criticisms that presuppose some of the parameters economics takes for granted, and "external" criticisms - criticisms made from, say, other civilizational points of view? If so, can we further distinguish between criticisms driven by motives such as safeguarding one's authentic indigenity, from other criticisms that embody alternative universals -- universals that call into question the wisdom of the reigning universal, universals that hold out the promise of other possible futures?

SECTION II

8. What alternatives could such critiques offer to the predominant development model? Are these critiques merely abstract exercises or is it possible to point to some concrete instances of such alternatives? Would such critiques have to step outside the confines of ethics as distributional justice, and begin to examine questions that appear unrelated to economics, but have a strong bearing nevertheless on the possibilities for renewal in some societies? Questions having to do with the self, say? Or with memory?

9. If some societies are by and large ahistorical - that is to say, the historical is still not the predominant form in which the past is constructed - then what implications does this have for forms of social intervention that could bring about a renewal in these societies? If "development" is not the proper language to use when referring to such societies, then what kinds of vocabularies are appropriate? What sorts of categories have been effectively used in places that have witnessed such social renewal?

10. What accounts for the efficacy of these forms of intervention? What are the limitations of economics and other social sciences in being able to account for them? In what way might these be related to their privileging the historical mode and the derivative concept of development? In their constructions of the human being as the autonomous individual or as belonging to well-defined communities or as free-floating substance-less post-modern entities, are these social sciences able to do justice to the nature of the self? What are the consequences of such assumptions about the self for our futures? What might be some alternative ways of understanding the self? Do these have consequences for social intervention and renewal?

11. Would it be appropriate to speak of the pathologies of development when examining some of the dilemmas of the "developed" societies? What light would such a critique shed on the present condition of the "developed"? What are the sorts of connections that tie the "developed" societies to the "undeveloped"? Are there lessons here for both the "developed" and the "undeveloped"? Is it possible to imagine futures other than that charted by the development idea? What kinds of tasks does this call us to? Just what is at stake here?