Issues in Politics and Economics CRN 10362

Theme: “Pricing the Priceless: Art, Politics and Economics”

Spring 2002

Required books:

Course Description

a. The Collegium : This course is part of the Collegium of Integrated Learning and is required for the B.A. in Liberal Studies. Students and faculty will work together to investigate selected contemporary political/economic issues and problems and how they have developed across time. Individually and in teams, students will develop "intellectual histories" of an issue or problem. These "histories" will require building an integrated context by examining issues through the perspectives and methods of knowing in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Organized in interdisciplinary ways and problem-based, the course will stress engaged learning. Students will be expected to formulate their own interpretations and responses to the issues. Consequently, success in the course will rely heavily on critical, creative, systematic, and collaborative thinking and the sophisticated use of communication, information, and technological skills.

b. Issues in Politics and Economics : This course is about how resources are produced and distributed. Should goods and services be produced by the invisible hand of the market? Or should government use “scientific knowledge” to equitably plan the production and distribution of resources? Or should the community be in charge of these tasks? This course will analyze these questions. There are a myriad of meaningful options associated with these questions. This is why THIS EXERCISE REQUIRES YOU TO BE MINDFUL. THERE ARE NO RIGHT OR WRONG ANSWERS when building intellectual histories.  All these different meaningful options tend to come in ideological packages in which the notions of government, market, and community are all bound together in distinct ways. A major claim that will be made in this course is that these packages tend to assume the form of narratives or stories. These stories strive to give us a sense of bearing in the world by telling us where we come from, where we are in our history, and where we are or may be going. The clash between these different narratives captures the key conflicts and debates in contemporary society. The primary concern of the course is to accurately represent these clashing narratives and then leave you (the student) to draw your own conclusions. The method for presenting these materials will be to consider the vision each narrative has of the past, present, and future. Hence the class is divided into an investigation of the past, and consideration of the present, and a look ahead at the future.  

c. For this class, we will build an intellectual history of the ways the "arts" are produced, distributed and consumed in the local economy, the U.S. and the world.  This journey will start by looking briefly at the  the political and economic factors currently shaping the "art world" in the United States.  We will then equip ourselves with the tools economists and political scientists use to analyze phenomena.  At that point, we will be ready to travel to the not so dark Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the 19th Century to uncover the "past" events that have shaped the art world.  We will come back to the present and conduct a more in depth analysis of the arts in the United States and the world.  Finally, we will sit down and discuss what we expect the future of the art world to be.