What is Capitalism?
Capitalism gets examined here not through classical economics but through the lens of social science, asking what the system actually is, how it emerged, and why it draws such sharply divided reactions. The course, from MIT, sets its questions against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, tracing capitalism's moral, social, and political dimensions alongside its economic ones. Lectures and readings compare how capitalism has played out across different historical periods and regions, testing whether it should even be understood as a single coherent system. Materials include the full MIT OpenCourseWare syllabus, readings, and assignments, free to access with no enrollment or certificate fee. The approach suits students of anthropology and sociology as much as economics, treating capitalism as a lived arrangement of institutions and beliefs rather than a fixed theoretical model.