I’m going to be speaking in Santa Barbara on Thursday and Friday of this week (January 24 and 25).

On Thursday, at 12:30, on the UC Santa Barbara campus, I’ll be delivering the Phi Beta Kappa Public Lecture, on “Why do—or did—economists read the ancient Greeks?”

On Friday, at 10 am, I’ll be doing a workshop on my book-in-progress “King Capital.”

You can get all the details for either of these events here. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello.

An excerpt from the talk:

Through a close reading of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, I’ll show how two economists used the ancient Greeks to identify a different turn and possibility in the modern world. Not a turn to economism that needs a corrective political hand, crafted in the ancient mold, to restore the ancient world. Smith and Marx used the ancients to identify all the ways in which Greek political values appear in our everyday economic relationships and practices. On this view, we don’t need to subordinate economics to politics. We need instead to see the ways in which economics is already political, to see the ways in which political values have been translated or sublimated into an economic idiom, where the polis is not eclipsed but is instead recreated in the market and the workplace. Once we identify these political elements—these ancient political elements—in our economic practices and institutions, we’ll see that the place to exercise ancient political values is not in some recreated polis but in the work we’re already doing every day. Once we see that politics is “a part of the working day,” as C.L.R. James put it, we’ll see not only that “every cook can govern”—that is, that everyone can be a part of the political process—but that every cook, by virtue of cooking, with others, is already engaged in governing, exercising all sorts of political skills and virtues.