GOVT-499 Department Seminar: Politics, Markets and Cultures

Professor Douglass

We are living in a time of unprecedented triumph for market economies. This course is designed to explore the cultural and political implications of that development through a particular lens--the view of market economies provided by the famous German sociologist Max Weber in a monograph published in the early 1900's called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The course is designed to acquaint students with Weber's understanding of the cultural ethos of societies with market economies and then to enable them to compare his view with a selection of other, more recent treatments of the same subject. Those readings will be drawn from the works of such scholars as Daniel Bell (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism), Robert Lane (The Market Experience), Ronald Inglehardt (Culture Shift), and Ernest Gellner (Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion). The course is conducted as a seminar, and each student enrolled in the course is expected to present a draft of a final paper to the class.

Other academic years
There is information about this course number in other academic years:

• 2005-2006 Fall and Spring
• 2006-2007 Fall and Spring
• 2007-2008 Fall and Spring
• 2008-2009 Fall and Spring
• 2009-2010 Fall and Spring
• 2012-2013 Fall and Spring
• 2013-2014 Fall and Spring

More information
Look for this course in the schedule of classes.

The academic department web site for this program may provide other details about this course.