Dr David Woodruff

This course is available on the MSc in Development Studies, MSc in Political Science (Conflict Studies and Comparative Politics), MSc in Political Science (Global Politics), MSc in Political Science (Political Science and Political Economy), MSc in Public Administration and Government (LSE and Peking University) and MSc in Public Policy and Administration. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is capped. Priority will be given to MSc in Political Science students. In 2023-2024 all students on Department of Government programmes who wished to take the course were able to do so.

To introduce politics students to basic economic theorising; to discuss the nature of markets; review contemporary discussions regarding the role of the state in the economy; provide a comparison of the relationship of states and markets in different political settings and historical contexts. Indicative topics: The state and the institutional foundations of markets; states and markets in the Great Depression; domestic and international monetary institutions; varieties of capitalism and change in varieties of capitalism; economics and politics of market bubbles; politics and policy in the financial crisis of 2007-2009; the Eurozone crisis.

This course is delivered through a combination of seminars and lectures totalling a minimum of 28 and a half hours in the Autumn Term.

There will be a reading week in Week 6 of the AT.

All students are expected to submit one non-assessed essay.

Block, Fred. “The Roles of the State in the Economy.” The Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil J Smelser and Richard Swedberg, Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 691–710.

Keynes, John Maynard. “The Means to Prosperity.” The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, edited by Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, vol. VI, Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 335–66, doi:10.1017/UPO9781139524162.

Fourcade‐Gourinchas, Marion, and Sarah L. Babb. “The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 108, no. 3, 2002, pp. 533–79, doi:10.1086/367922.

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours) in the January exam period.