PS 378 - First Critics and Defenders of Global Capitalism

(3.00 cr.)

An examination of the issues surrounding "globalization," this course takes its bearings from the fierce debates over effects of increased global economic interdependence raised by dramatic social and economic changes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The complex effects of these shifts upon stubbornly independent polities were analyzed with great clarity and foresight by thinkers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Smith, Jefferson, Tocqueville, and Weber, whose primary writings are considered. Contemporary assessments of the present-day effects of globalization are also utilized, drawn from works of history, economics, sociology, and political theory. GT