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I am not a fan of readers. 
 
At Barnard College, we have a course "Theoretical Foundations of Political 
Economy" that we teach as a required sophomore level course taken often at 
the same time students are taking "Intermediate Micro" or "Intermediate 
Macro". Different people teach the course in different ways, which means 
they include different authors and focus on different themes, but always 
the course focuses on reading primary texts in more or less their entirety. 
Students write three papers throughout the course. 
 
In general, we find that the course works best when it covers relatively 
few authors in some depth.  That way students can see better the 
interrelationship of different bits of economic theory and how that 
interrelationship changes over time.  Always there is a lot of Smith 
(origin of classical econ) and a lot of Marx (last great classical econ).  
Some people do a Smith to Marx course, doing Malthus and Ricardo in the 
middle.  Most, though, try to get to the twentieth century in some way or 
another. 
 
I have always done a Smith, Marx, Keynes course, but probably that is 
because I am mostly interested in growth, distribution, and money.  More 
important from a pedagogical perspective, I have always supplemented the 
main texts (WoN, Capital, GT) with appropriate works of economic history 
(Braudel's Wheels of Commerce, Polanyi's Great Transformation, Chandler's 
Visible Hand) in order to present the texts as attempts to theorize the 
three great economic revolutions (commercial revolution, industrial 
revolution, managerial revolution). 
 
My biggest regret about the course I most recently taught is its excessive 
European focus.  Maybe next time I teach it I will ditch Keynes and 
substitute Irving Fisher and Thorstein Veblen.  Maybe I will even use Henry 
George Poverty and Progress briefly as a predecessor, because he connects 
so well with Ricardo and Marx. 
 
Admittedly, Roy, this doesn't get us very far into the twentieth century, 
less far in fact than Keynes!  Maybe it leads in a useful direction 
however, at least for American audiences? 
 
We are just this year mounting our first upper level elective history of 
thought course, which will be mainly 20th century starting with the 
neoclassicals. In my opinion, if you have only one course, it should be 
mainly about the classical period, because of the greater contrast with 
what students will be learning in their intermediate theory courses, not to 
mention historical perspective.  Sorry about that, Roy! 
 
Perry Mehrling 
 
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