Institutional Foundations of Markets

The course will take a historical approach.

Starting with Ancient Greece, we will discuss the birth of democracy in Athens in comparison to the development of oligarchy in other city states of the Greek Peninsula such as Sparta. We will introduce the role of conflict across classes in the society, via the Aristotelian view of the role of military classes in the choice of political institutions.

We will then broaden our perspective by introducing conflict across classes of income, by turning to the classic political economy thinkers of the XIXth century such as Ricardo and Marx, and discuss why the revolution predicted by Marx did not take place.

This will allow us to think more largely of the boundaries of institutions: to which entity should institutions be applied to ? What make people think they belong to a common political space ?

In turn, this will raise the question of the sense of belonging, the sense of identity. We will study the construction of identity, taking the case of France in the XIXth century, and discuss the division of countries such as India.