Mission

The mission of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics is to promote research and teaching that engages in scholarship across fields that intersect through those three disciplinary and topical boundaries. Guided by an expansive appreciation for interdisciplinary and multimethod approaches, the Center is focused on advancing critical thinking and constructive civil discourse in the service of public and scholarly understanding of pressing social issues.

Francis Wayland, the fourth President of Brown, was a luminary figure in political economy. His book, the Principles of Political Economy, married insights from his earlier work in moral philosophy about ethics, human nature and well-being, with a systemic approach to questions about the nature and accumulation of wealth. In many respects, Wayland reflects the Enlightenment values of his predecessors in political economy and is one of many important members of the Brown community who emphasized our central and historic values for interdisciplinary learning and open inquiry. 

Building on this legacy, the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics invites students and faculty into a scholarly conversation about the values, institutions, and incentives that govern societies.  

While we recognize the importance of disciplinary expertise, the complex and multi- faceted problems facing the world today demand a more interdisciplinary analysis. Even rigorous social scientific analysis must confront pressing and difficult normative questions and tradeoffs. Normative theorists likewise must understand well-established social scientific facts and accurately consider a wide range of existing economic, social, and political processes. 

Unlike PPE programs that engage disciplinary perspectives in parallel, Brown PPE is grounded in an integrative methodology the reunifies disciplines that were once deployed together. The goal is not merely to learn from each discipline, but to offer distinctive courses and a range of supportive academic programs that bring conceptual, theoretical, and methodological approaches across these disciplinary lines. 

Substantively, our work is guided by a broad commitment to understanding the interplay between individual agency and social structure, normative and positive analysis, and institutional design and ethical evaluation. Common thematic concerns include questions about social cooperation, coordination, efficiency, markets, justice, freedom, fairness, equality, democracy, and deliberation. PPE thus draws from the integration of three disciplines to study a broad range of topics—from the ethics of wealth creation to the design of democratic institutions, from the moral limits of markets to the political economy of global crises, and from theories of justice to the logic of collective action.