Institutional Foundations of Markets

By tracing the major stages of economic thought and reading key texts from this history, this course aims to give students a deeper understanding of this history and the issues that continue to drive it today.

Consideration will be given to reflections on the origins of the market economy and the different judgments made about it.

To this end, the course will follow a chronological presentation of different economists and schools of thought. It will be structured around two main themes:

1. The establishment of economic questions and tools, particularly around the question of value—what explains the formation of prices and wages in a market, what is the origin of profit, etc. 
2. The questions that have constantly accompanied modern economics, raised by economists themselves, about the human and social dimensions of the market economy, and how these dimensions should be judged.

The course outline will be as follows:

• A historical introduction from antiquity (Aristotle) to the 17th-18th centuries (mercantilists and physiocrats).
• Adam Smith
• The classics (especially Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo)
• Karl Marx
• The marginalist theory of the 19th century (especially Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras)
• Debates in the first half of the 20th century on liberalism, the 1929 crisis and World War II : John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi, Joseph Schumpeter.