Instructor: Colin Drumm

Today, the economic concept of “Value” is the nearly exclusive province of Marxists, whose claim to rigor is based upon preserving this concept in the face of the so-called marginalist revolution. But when Marx talked about Value he was not insisting on a partisan concept, but adopting and re-configuring a pre-existing one. This course examines the history of the Value concept leading up to Marx, who, as its first intellectual historian, presented this history as culminating in himself. We will re-examine this history by re-introducing the centrality, elided by Marx, of questions about the state: Value theories were developed by British and French economists to intervene into debates about the power of the state to tax, spend, and borrow and the implications of these activities. This trajectory will be traced through an examination of the works of Petty, Cantillon, Steuart, Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and others.