On April 28th the College of the Humanities at Carleton will be hosting a one day workshop that seeks to bridge the gap between Great Books and good business. The Culture of Commerce workshop will bring together professors from across North America drawn from programs in Commerce, Humanities and the Social Sciences. The aim of the workshop is to develop a first-year curriculum for Commerce and Business students that grounds them in the art, culture and literature of commercial society. The workshop will consider everything from Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Draper’s Guild to Frederic Bastiat’s Who Feeds Paris and the Frank Capra classic It’s A Wonderful Life.
The College of the Humanities was founded on the idea that the study of culture provides our students with the vital metaphor, example and context that shaped life in the past and continue to inform it in the present. The fundamentally communicative character of commercial culture, with its emphasis on cooperation, consent and individual autonomy, asks more of culture than other social systems. Perhaps contrary to popular expectation then, commerce students more than most may require the resources traditionally offered by the Great Books. It is this reality that the workshop seeks to address by developing course materials and encouraging connections between the humanities and business programs.
This workshop, chaired by Geoffrey C. Kellow, Associate Professor in the College of the Humanities, was made possible by a generous grant from the Hecht Foundation.
