Marxist Concepts and Historical Writing

Catalog description

This course will introduce students to the main topics in Marxist historical analysis, with the aim of helping students understand the themes, concepts and debates that have animated Marxist historiography of different kinds. It will focus primarily on writing available in English, but will include work on both Europe and the wider world, particularly the colonial and postcolonial world. It will outline basic analytical traditions within Marxism and their relations to historical writing. Concepts will include economy and society, mode of production, surplus value, bourgeois revolution, imperialism, primitive accumulation, ideology, and hegemony. Themes and debates will include the agrarian and commercial contexts in the rise of capitalism, global dynamics of finance/late capitalism, peasant and worker histories, including class formation and rebellion and resistance. Readings may include excerpts from Marx’s writing itself as well as Marxist thinkers like Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Althusser, Adorno, Thompson, Banaji, and Harvey.