Humanomics: Economics and the Humanities, 7,5 credits

Humanekonomi: nationalekonomi och humaniora, 7,5 högskolepoäng

The course introduces a new way of doing economics and social sciences-related studies such as in business or law or political science, keeping the quantitative and modeling methods of social science but opening them to other ways of knowing in the humanities (German Geisteswissenschaften). The course shows how novels, plays, philosophy, linguistics, history all contribute to the understanding of society and of the economy, especially in the matter of human meaning and its interaction with human behavior.

Type of instruction

The course is an intensive course. We spend each morning session on the (rather small as yet) specialized literature on the subject, together with classics in the humanities such as Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" in their application to how economies work.

One of the sessions is an intensive study of Ibsen's The Master Builder [Bygmester Solness] as a case in point. All the reading is to be done before arriving, in order to give maximum opportunities for conversation.

The afternoons are devoted to intensive discussion of essays-in-progress the participants bring to the seminar, with an eye to strengthening them for publication in a humanistic way or a "scientific" way, depending on the (opposite) orientation of the scholar. The essays must be submitted for circulation in advance of the course.