A Message from the Director At a time of ever greater wealth disparities, the question of what forms of economic organization can best ensure that the needs of society are met has become an urgent political issue. As an increasing number of US politicians identify themselves as “democratic socialists,” there is a renewed focus on balancing wealth creation with wealth distribution, affecting areas like healthcare, education, and environmental protection.
In our first Fall 2026 class, Capitalism/Socialism, Associate Professor of Political Science Jonny Thakkar will explore “these competing visions of how economic life should be organized in a good society.”
For literature and history devotees, Phil Weinstein, the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor Emeritus of English, will show how “dramas of yearning and desire” are presented in three famous novels from the 19th and 20th century: Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), and Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf).
Course registration will open by mid-August.
–Hansjakob Werlen
Fall 2026 Courses Socialism/Capitalism with Associate Professor of Political Science Jonny Thakkar
It’s often said that we live in a capitalist world, but what exactly is capitalism and how does it differ from its traditional rival, socialism? You might think of this as primarily a social-scientific question, to be answered by empirical inquiry into different forms of political economy — but it is also a question about the way we carve up the world into different concepts for the sake of different political goals. This course concerns the intertwined development of what we might call the “ideals” of capitalism and socialism: competing visions of how economic life should be organized in a good society. We begin with an emblematic 21st-century debate between the Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen and the libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan, in their duelling books Why Not Socialism? and Why Not Capitalism? We then go back to Adam Smith and Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, and John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek in the twentieth century, before ending with a discussion of the prospects of capitalism and socialism today.
This virtual class will be held on the following Wednesdays: Sept. 16, Sept. 23, Sept. 30, Oct. 7, Oct. 21, Oct. 28, Nov. 4, Nov. 11
Jonny Thakkar is a political philosopher at Swarthmore College. His work combines attention to normative questions, such as the responsibility to work for the common good, with scholarly work on historical figures, such as Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx. He is the author of Plato as Critical Theorist (HUP, 2018) as well as various essays and articles. In addition to his responsibilities at Swarthmore, he is also a founding editor of The Point , a Chicago-based journal of ideas that aims to foster the examined life by means of longform writing about contemporary life and culture.
Gender Dramas: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Woolf with Philip Weinstein, Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor Emeritus of English
“What does a woman want?” Freud’s famous question has been asked — and in strikingly different ways illuminated — by writers well before and after Freud. We shall explore dramas of yearning and desire in three remarkable novels of the 19th and early 20th century: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1851), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The heroines in these novels memorably confront and engage gender norms operative in their culture. What light does each novel shed on the struggles engaged? How do the novels’ embodied stance toward such gender arrangements affect that light? Perhaps a third question as well: how does their way of dramatizing these issues provoke questions of your own? “Gender” serves as the fulcrum in this course description, but our aim goes beyond any set of “prescriptions” or “proscriptions.” Rather, it is to do justice to each writer’s creative take on the drama of yearning and desire.
This virtual class will be held on the following Tuesdays: Sept. 8, Sept. 22, Oct. 6, Oct. 27, Nov. 10, Dec. 1, Dec. 15
Philip Weinstein joined the Swarthmore College English Department in the early 1970s, teaching there until his retirement in 2015. He has published nine books of literary criticism, with special interest in Faulkner (his Becoming Faulkner won the Hugh Holman for the best book on Southern Literature published in 2010).
A regular contributor to LLS classes, Phil has continued to teach and to write, post-retirement. His most recent book — Time’s Bounty (2026) — examines several dramas set in motion by our entry into old age. In literate but jargon-free language, Time’s Bounty seeks to shed light on a phenomenon shared by a very large audience indeed: the phenomenon of aging.Questions? Please contact Mary Carr at mcarr1@swarthmore.edu
