[Week 4] January 27+29 - Political economy as tragedy and as "master-science of civil life"

Assigned reading:

(Monday) Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the times,” Edinburgh Review 49 no. 98 (June 1829): 439–459.

(Monday) Marx and Engels, "He becomes an appendage of the machine," in section 1, "Bourgeois and proletarians," from The Communist Manifesto (1848). [Read this whole section, but concentrate on the middle portion, where they spell out their position on machinery.] [Feel free to read this in any one of eighty languages.] [If you prefer, you may read the earliest English translation in The Red Republican (November 1850): 161–190 (passim).]

(Wednesday) Friedrich List, "The theory of productive forces and the theory of values," National System of Political Economy (1856 [1841]), 208-228. [original German text] [Hungarian, Russian, French]

Further resources:

M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith, "Work and waste: Political economy and natural philosophy in nineteenth century Britain," History of Science 27 (1989) (part 1 and part 2) and 28 (1990) (part 3).

Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics (1989). 

Donald Mackenzie, "Marx and the Machine," Technology and Culture 25 (1984): 473-502.

Bruce Bimber, "Karl Marx and the three faces of technological determinism," Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 333-351.