Angus Burgin
Assistant Professor
Twentieth-Century United States, political history, intellectual history, history of capitalism
The Johns Hopkins University
Department of History
3400 North Charles Street
338F Gilman Hall
Baltimore MD 21218
Telephone: (410) 516-0301
Email: burgin@jhu.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays 2:30pm-4:00pm, sign up here.
My research and teaching explore problems at the intersection of ideas, politics, and markets in the United States and the Atlantic world since the late nineteenth century. I recently finished a book manuscript for Harvard University Press, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, which draws on archival collections in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and the United States to examine the reemergence of free-market ideas in the decades following the onset of the Great Depression. It focuses on the members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international organization founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 to bring together economists, philosophers, journalists, and philanthropists who sought to rehabilitate public support for the market mechanism. In the years before the founding of the society, advocates of laissez-faire were marginalized within both the international scholarly community and the American political environment; a half-century later, opposition to state interference in the actions of the competitive market had become pervasive within economics faculties and increasingly influential in the public sphere. The Great Persuasion surveys the dynamics that made this transformation possible: between economists and politicians, intellectuals and rhetoricians, and transnational academic networks and domestic policy debates. This project has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Newcombe Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the 2010 Joseph Dorfman Prize by the History of Economics Society.
Course Offerings:
Spring 2013: Making America: Politics and Society since the Depression
Fall 2012: American Conservatisms
Fall 2012: History of Capitalism
Spring 2012: American Social Thought since 1865
Spring 2012: American Intellectual History
Spring 2011: The Intellectual History of Capitalism: 1900-Present
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