This is a syllabus for the course Political Epistemology – Knowledge and in Markets and Democracy from the PPE master of Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen. It contains the course structure and assigned readings for the 8 week course. The course summary reads as follows:

We live in societies marked by the interplay of capitalist markets and democratic political structures. Both markets and democracies are mechanisms of social coordination in which the aggregation of knowledge plays an important role. But what is knowledge in the first place? Does it make sense to refer to notions of “truth” or “facts” in political contexts? And how does the use of knowledge work in different social spheres? While markets aggregate certain forms of knowledge through the price mechanism, democracies attempt to do so through deliberation and voting. What are the strengths and weaknesses of these mechanisms, and how well do they work for different forms of knowledge? What difference does it make that we live in a “digital age”? And last but not least: how do the ways in which societies deal with knowledge influence the delicate interplay between capitalism and democracy?