The course looks at various theories of economics from the eighteenth century onwards, placing them next to contemporary theories of aesthetics, art and architecture. Is there a commona! lity to be found between the “primitive hut” of the Abbé Laugier, the early agricultural architecture of John Soane and Joseph Michel Gandy, and say, the political economy of James Steuart? Did Adam Smith’s theories of political economy have any relationship to the theories of aesthetics and the sublime of his day? Can the toll-gates that Claude Nicholas Ledoux designed for the Fermier Généraux be seen as an intrinsic part and parcel of the theories of physiocracy then current in the French monarchy? Can John Ruskin’s theories of the subject be placed alongside the concurrent nascence of “marginalist”, neoclassical theories of William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall? How did John Maynard Keynes’ support of the Arts Council and his relationship to the Bloomsbury group affect his economic thought? Which of these aesthetic pres! umptions were borne through into the demand-generating “New Towns” and reconstruction paradigms of the Marshall Plan? How is the current thrust on “name” architects in urban redevelopment schemes related to the new patterns of finance? What do we make of the financial reliance of the new architecture of Blairite London on the National Lottery?

This course is designed as an introduction to economic and aesthetic thought over the last two centuries. Typically, cultural theory has proceeded to examine aesthetics by locating it as the surface, the ideological sheen, of economic phenomena and socio-economic relations. This course reverses the equation, examining how economic theories might be inherently tied to presumptions whose germ cannot be described as anything other than aesthetic.

Economics has been cal! led the "dismal science". Would it be then so much of a stretch to call it an art? A flight of the imagination? Today, when universities and other institutions are increasingly shaped by the “incentivising” paradigms offered by contemporary economics, it is incumbent on us to learn, engage and contest the arguments by which such control is exerted over us.