HIST-LIT 90HQ: Cultures of Capitalism in the United States

Instructor: Emmet von Stackelberg
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:00-5:00 pm

Capitalism is an inheritance of the United States. Its promises—resource abundance, private ownership, economic autonomy—are at the heart of what is now called the American Dream. Celebrants and detractors alike have viewed both capitalism and the US as dynamic, always oriented toward the promise of a better future. But Americans of all sorts have long sought to tame capitalism: to shelter themselves from its risks, to limit the power of its titans, to fight its manifest inequities. This course charts how capitalism came to be interpolated into the daily life of almost every American, and how this interpolation was reflected, refracted, and even fought across American culture and thought. Beginning with the panics and corporate consolidations of the 19th century and continuing through the rise of neoliberalism, we’ll trace the spread of wholly new concepts in American life, including personal failure, economic risk, even the idea of “the economy” itself. We will follow the emergence of two central capitalist dynamics, two ways of seeing the future, seemingly at odds: the speculative urge of fortune-seeking and the calculative drive of risk-avoidance. How did observers of America’s economic fortunes reconcile these two visions of capitalism? We will read a range of thinkers seeking to understand the functions, ethics, and history of capitalism, including Max Weber, Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois, Rosa Luxembourg, Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, and Milton Friedman. Alongside them, we’ll follow American economic life in poetry, fiction, plays, film, song, and visual art. Authors and artists may include Edith Wharton, Hermann Melville, Simon Pokagon, Walt Whitman, Preston Sturges, Nina Simone, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, and Zora Neale Hurston.