PPE Colloquium, Fall 2026

In the Fall of 2026, the PPE Colloquium will be offered by Professor Kenneth Scheve, the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Political Science and I.A. O'Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters.  The Colloquium will meet Mondays, 3:30-4:20.

Description:

Monopoly and Democracy. What are the consequences of monopolistic markets for the practice of democracy? This course will start with a review of the origins of democracy in small societies, discuss the challenges to democratic forms of government in large polities, outline the solutions to these problems that allowed for the emergence and spread of large-scale democratic governments, and then investigate the characteristics and consequences of modern democracy in practice. The course will then turn to understanding the economic and political origins of monopolistic markets as well as their economic effects. We will then turn to the main question of the course, which is whether and how monopoly harms democratic practice and the implications of those findings for the regulatory role of the state in market economies. We will consider arguments and evidence on this question from the second industrial revolution in the late 19th century to the digital economy of the present.