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This is the homepage of our course on Adam Smith, Karl Marx and the ethical content of capitalism. No other philosophers have shaped the course of humankind more than those two thinkers and the influence of those two thinkers bears witness to the power of philosophy to shape the world. In this course we will get to know the basic works of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Thereby, we will not just concentrate on the immense differences of those giants of western thought. More importantly, we will try to bring the main arguments of each of those two authors in a productive and fruitful, comparative dialogue with one another. Last but not least, we will attest the ongoing influence of those thinkers by turning to recent literature from both the neoliberal and  welfarist threads of thought. Seen this way, the course attempts to shed some light in our current political, social and economical situation through the lenses of its two founding fathers, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, in order to detect and scrutinize how they would react if faced with the challenges posed today.
COURSE CONTENT Adam Smith and Karl Marx: Two people, two worldviews. On the one side stands Adam Smith, the first theorist of a type of economy which back then was still in its infancy and we nowadays call capitalism. For Smith, this type of economy is based on wealth, aimes at the wealth’s expansion and privileges social structures that further the wealth's expansion. Every grievance of the system is acquitted - according to Smith’s harsh critics - thanks to the self-regulatory power of the “invisible hand“ and the supposed free will that Smith ascribes to the individual is nothing but the legitimization of the exploitation of the disadvantaged many by the privileged few. On the other hand stands Karl Marx who dedicated his life analyzing the same – in-between established – form of economic production. Capitalism was no more a neutral economic form that - as Smith envisaged it - was based on free will, autonomy and self-legislation in order to allow for the individual to express and develop itself. 2 According to Marx' systemic close reading, capitalism was nothing but a default system based on an insurmountable contradiction: Capitalism is a self-destructive economic form which rests on alienation and exploitation and brings forward social structures that are geared towards increasing accumulation via the creation of national states who act as instruments in favour of the ones in possession of the means of production. Accurate as Marx might have been, he was not spared either. While Smith was accused of looking away as people tore each other apart in favor of expansion and wealth accumulation, Marx was accused of degrading people to a will-less cog of a blind, suffocating, and inhumane system. Regardless of how formative and persistent these two images have been regarding our perception of Adam Smiths and Karl Marx's theories, there is more than just a yawning chasm between them. On the one hand, voices have been recently raised that draw our attention to the discrepancy between the earlier and the later Adam Smith. Adam Smith was not only the author of the celebrated The Wealth of Nations published in 1776, but also the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1759. While the later work, i.e. the Wealth of Nations, could as a matter of fact corroborate te critique exerted against Smith, the earlier work, i.e. the Theory of Moral Sentiments, is a philosophical work that postulates ethical values such as solidarity and empathy in the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. This debate re-launched and called the "Adam Smith problem", is being attempted to be resolved by rereading and reinterpreting The Wealth of Nations from the background of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. On the other hand, there is something similar to observe with Karl Marx. Karl Marx is not only the author of the three-volume Capital, the first volume of which appeared in 1867. He is also the author of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from 1844, which he wrote as a journalist in exile in Paris. While in the Capital Marx provides a structural and critical analysis of capitalist economic structures, the Manuscripts of the young Marx are teeming with passages highlighting the uniqueness and singularity of the individual, its passions, and the individual's yearning for human coexistence. This "epistemological break", as it has been called, is being attempted - in a similar move to Adam Smith - to be solved by reading and understanding Capital in a henceforth socialontological and not merely structural way. Following these considerations, the first two parts of the courses are dedicated in gettiing to kknow better the theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Concerning Smith, we will begin by reading excerpts from his Theory of Moral Sentiments before we turn to his better known The Wealth of the Nations. Concerning Marx, we will find our away in his Capital after having read his earlier Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and we will continue by turning to some later texts of Marx with a clearer political character like the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and the Critique of the Gotha Program. Following three axes will prove indispensable for our itinerary: (1) the structure and character of human nature, (2) social organizational structures, (3) interpersonal relationships. In the third and last part, we will try to understand the ethical content that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx tried to implant in the social fabric of economy by turning to the works of recent authors that attempted to bridge the supposedly yawning abyss between Smith and Marx. The works of John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, certain representatives of the Austrian (especially Friedrich August von Hayek) or the Chicago School (especially Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Garry Becker) will prove essential towards this objective. This last section will also help us scrutinize the differences between the prevailing neoliberalism and traditional liberalism as well 3 as reflect upon current forms of capitalist ethics like "corporate social responsibility", "corporate governance" and "corporate citizenship".


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