Starting in the first semester of 2023 and on an annual basis, FARO UDD will offer a Master’s Program in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, which will last 4 semesters. The program will be officially launched within the next few weeks.
PABLO PANIAGUA P., DIRECTOR OF THE MASTER’S DEGREE IN PPE, RECOMMENDS THIS PROGRAM AND INVITES STUDENTS TO ENROLL IN IT
A warm introductory welcome to the Master’s Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) of the Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD), Chile. My name is Pablo Paniagua Prieto, and I am the Academic Director of the Master’s Program in PPE and Professor in Political Economy at the Center Faro UDD. I am excited to present this unique multidisciplinary program in Chile—the first PPE Master’s program in Spanish in the world—which innovatively adopts a political, philosophical, and economic understanding of social phenomena and contemporary challenges.
Economics is a social science born from the political, philosophical, and sociological reflections of scholars of merchant societies, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Karl Marx. This interdisciplinary vision of political economy, as a reflection of the social space, culminated with the work of John Stuart Mill. But thereafter, it fell into disuse due to the neoclassical revolution. With the current hyper-specialization of academic disciplines, economists have become mere technicians, turning their backs on political economy and its relationship with moral philosophy, ethics, political institutions, and with the social system as a whole. This reductionist and simplifying vision has progressively distanced economics away from the ethical, moral, and political underpinnings of a prosperous economic order; such changes have deeply impoverished the public debate and our understanding of modernity, markets, and their tensions. Thanks to the interdisciplinary works of Nobel Laureates such as James Buchanan, Amartya Sen, and Elinor Ostrom, political economy has reemerged as a serious discipline.
The current narrow view of economics as mere formal techniques demonstrates a lack of interdisciplinary reflections and efforts to integrate the social and human sciences. Such an impoverishing trend is evident in Chile and elsewhere over recent decades. These elements have all contributed to an intellectual myopia and a lack of reasonable and pondered dialogue that have led to profound social and political polarization, alongside socioeconomic conflicts. Precisely in the face of this urgent context and with a polarized public debate, we have carefully crafted our Master’s program in PPE with the aim to rescue the vision under which political economy and human progress were born: hand-in-hand with ethics, moral philosophy, and with the understanding of how these are inseparable from political, social, and democratic institutions.
Nobel Laurate F.A. Hayek once observed that, “nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist — and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger”. I would moreover dare to add that no one can be a good philosopher, a good sociologist, or a good political scientist, by being only just those things; these may be equal or even worse dangers for society than the myopic economist. Henceforward, we have designed this Master’s program in PPE to combat the current myopia and one-dimensionality of the social sciences, which has led to intellectual arrogance and polarization, as well as to slowly dismantled the foundations of free and prosperous societies. I invite you to join our program and embark on an exciting path of rigorous academic training and human and intellectual development from which I am sure you and society will reap great benefits.
Dr. Pablo Paniagua Prieto, Ph.D. in Political Economy from King’s College London, Academic Director of the Master’s program in PPE, Universidad del Desarrollo
If you want to receive more information about the Master’s Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, please contact us.