----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]