THE COMMONS AND THE MARKET in Fall 2020 (PL2060)

Over the past decades under the neoliberal zeitgeist, the reliance on markets has expanded to a host of new spheres, such as CO2 emissions or education, often in tandem with the privatization of public services and goods. At the same time, the idea of “the commons” has reappeared in relation to values such as biodiversity, the Earth’s climate, or human knowledge (Wikipedia, open access). What are the justifications and implications of using markets, and what kind of arrangements are necessary to establish and protect the commons? In this course, students will study some of the major contributions to this debate: foundational texts of neoliberal economics that aim to legitimize market mechanisms; philosophical treatments and critiques of key concepts such as rationality and motivation, property and common goods; political analyses of how allocative institutions – markets, governments, and cooperative alternatives – produce distributional outcomes. The theoretical discussions will be applied to a variety of contemporary issues, and students will develop a research paper on one “markets or commons?” issue of their choice. The course also serves to fulfil the “writing in the discipline” requirement of AUP’s Global Liberal Arts Core Curriculum for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: students will train their ability to distinguish and develop economic, philosophical and political arguments, and to build convincing political economy analyses.