HIST 6085

Economic Globalization and Democratic Crisis, 1870-present

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

Our current age is not the first time in modern history that economic globalization is seen by many as a cause of democratic crisis. This course brings together the history of capitalism with the political history of democracy. Its first aim is to show how the ongoing material and technical integration of the globe is both an enabling condition of mass democracy and a constraint on it. The second goal is to show how empires, nation-states, and international institutions have managed the tension between global economic integration and local political autonomy in different ways. We will discuss a series of key moments in the history of global capitalism in relation to transformations and crises of democracy, beginning in the era of High Imperialism in the 1870s-1880s; then moving to the populism of the 1890s; the interwar crisis of democracy beginning with World War I in 1914 through to the Great Depression and World War II; the post-WWII years, ending in the stagflation and oil crises of the 1970s; and the last four decades of economic globalization, from the debt crisis of the 1980s to the shocks of the 1990s and 2000s which form the precursor to the current turmoil. A second line of inquiry is to get a better grip on the analytical traditions that have grappled with and responded to these recurring crises, from different Marxist approaches and world systems theory to Polanyian political economy, neoliberalism, new institutional economics, Keynesianism, macro-finance and Minsky, and a variety of sociological paradigms from Weber and Habermas to Wolfgang Streeck and Ulrich Beck.

When Offered Fall.

View Enrollment Information