History of Political Economic Thought IV: 1948 - Present & Beyond

About this event

How do we make sense of the sweeping transformations shaping our global order from the post-war architecture of 1948 to the artificial intelligence and climate-constrained realities of 2026? This seminar moves beyond rote memorization, treating intellectual history as a toolkit of working instruments rather than a museum of dead ideas. Designed for thinkers, researchers, and citizens who want rigorous analytical frameworks, this session tests four foundational intellectual traditions against historical episodes and structural shifts: • Aristotle: The teleological distinction between household provisioning (oikonomos) and limit-seeking wealth accumulation (khremaristike). • Toynbee: The dynamics of civilizational challenge, creative minorities, and institutional response. • Ibn Khaldun: The cyclical rise and fall of group solidarity (asabiyya) against commercial and administrative decay. • Henry George: The law of human progress, examining how association paired with diverging rights generates poverty through rent capture. A central focus of the seminar is the rent thread—tracing economic rent and rent-seeking from classical land enclosure and usury to modern financialisation, intellectual property regimes, and digital/compute enclosures. Session Itinerary & Core Themes 1. Four Instruments & The Rent Thread: Defining our baseline concepts and exploring whether rent-seeking is a moral failure, a structural outcome, or both. 2. 1948–1973: Bretton Woods and Keynes at the Centre: Examining embedded liberalism, capital controls, the golden-age growth record, and structuralist trade theories. 3. Decolonisation and the First Climate Silence: Analyzing decolonisation through challenge-and-response, the Non-Aligned Movement, and how the global North's early environmental frameworks framed ecological limits as a growth ceiling. 4. 1973–2008: Neoliberal Turn and the Rentier Resurgence: Tracing the stagflation crisis, the monetarism shift, structural adjustment programs, and the financialisation of the global economy. 5. 2008–2026: Crisis Economics, MMT, and Climate as Constraint: Evaluating quantitative easing, modern monetary theory debates, evolving BRICS expansion rosters, and climate-finance architectures. 6. The Next Three Quarters: Georgism Revisited: Investigating land-value capture, resource rents, and whether the economic returns to artificial intelligence and compute infrastructure will reproduce historical patterns of progress and poverty. Required Reading & Preparation Participants are expected to engage with foundational texts prior to the session, including selections from Aristotle's Politics, Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, Henry George's Progress and Poverty, Arnold Toynbee, Raúl Prebisch, and contemporary climate-economic syntheses. Come prepared to name historical episodes precisely, apply a single analytical instrument, state your falsifiers clearly, and distinguish strict description from political prescription. | Join us for a fascinating exploration of a hundred years that reshaped the world and established the foundations of the economic and political order we inhabit today. | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | |