Introduction to Political Theory (Spring 2019)

Political Theory is the study of the ideas, concepts, and arguments that allow us to, as Hannah Arendt puts it, “think what we are doing” – to make sense of the foundations and possibilities of our shared political life. In this course, students will gain a familiarity and fluency with the main traditions, themes, and debates of Political Theory, focusing in particular on the issues of virtue, justice, nature, freedom, authority, violence, power, race, sex, and gender. Students will be challenged to reconsider their political preconceptions and commitments in light of reading, discussing, and writing about authors from diverse historical backgrounds and ideological perspectives. In this way, students will themselves participate in the tradition of Political Theory. This writing-intensive course proceeds in four roughly chronological thematic units. In Unit 1, “Virtue vs. Virtù,” we read works by Plato and Machiavelli that question the role of knowledge and morality in political life. Unit 2, “The Social Contract and its Critics” turns to John Locke, Carole Pateman, Charles Mills, and Jedediah Purdy to explore the foundations and limitations of the modern liberal state. In Unit 3, “Freedom, Colonialism, Violence,” we read the work of John Stuart Mill and Frantz Fanon to determine the meaning and value of individual freedom in a world marked by colonial and racial violence. Unit 4, “Power, Identity, Resistance” turns to Friedrich Nietzsche and Judith Butler to investigate how power operates to create modern political subjectivities, particularly the sexed and gendered subject.

Political Theory is the study of the ideas, concepts, and arguments that historical political figures have used to make sense of and influence their social, political, and cultural worlds. Studying these ideas, concepts, and arguments (many of which might sound quite foreign to our ears) allows us to, as Hannah Arendt puts it, " think what we are doing " politically – that is, to shed light on and suggest solutions to some of the biggest political problems facing the world today. In this course, students will gain a familiarity and fluency with the main traditions, themes, and debates that shape how we think about and participate in politics. Students will be challenged to reconsider their political preconceptions and commitments in light of reading, discussing, and writing about authors from diverse historical backgrounds and ideological perspectives. In this way, students will themselves participate in the tradition of Political Theory. This writing-intensive course proceeds in roughly chronological order and is organized around six “contested concepts” that have inspired political theorists in the past and that continue to motivate political debate today. In Unit 1, “Justice and the Ancient Tradition,” we read works by Thucydides, Plato, and Machiavelli to consider the meaning and value of a “just” political order. Unit 2, “Authority and the Modern Tradition,” explores the foundations of legitimate political authority by reading the classic social contract theorists (Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau) alongside contemporary critics of this tradition (Carole Pateman and Charles Mills). Unit 3, “Freedom and the Liberal Tradition,” examines J.S. Mill’s liberal conception of freedom in light of critiques offered by Karl Marx and W.E.B. Du Bois. Unit 4, “Power and the Postmodern Tradition,” explores how power operates to create modern political subjectivities by turning to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler. Unit 5, “Violence and the Radical Tradition,” stages a debate between Mahatma Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon about the value and efficacy of violence in radical political movements. Unit 6, “Trumpism and the Conservative Tradition,” turns to Edmund Burke and Corey Robin to consider whether the presidency of Donald Trump represents a continuation of or break with modern conservatism.

2013

Literatrure (broadly understood) has, historically, been a conduit for the best and worst of political statements. It has been a way to hide one's arguments in the mouths of others, to outwit censors, to provide cover for the writer, and to challenge or reinforce the status quo. Over the course of the semester, this course will approach political themes – historically rooted – through the reading of literature from attic tragedy to contemporary short stories and poety. Readings will include Sophocles' Antigone, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Georges Bataille's Blue of Noon, Chinua Achibe's Things Fall Apart; poems by Alan Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, and contemporary musicians; and short stories by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Zoe Wicomb. Each literary work will be paired with either explanatory theoretical texts that deals directly with the literature itself or contemporaneous writings engaging with the same themes as the fictional work. Students will be challenged to write both critically and analytically over the course of the semester. Through the readings the themes we will focus on are the questions of community, the idividual, the state, the subject, reason, faith, eroticism, geography, history, death, and evil. This may seem an overwhelming list, but we will find these themes to be necessarily interrelated in a the literature for the class. Moreover, we will discuss how different constructions around these various themes in the literature relates to and carries the politics of the time and the writing. We will delve into both the exoteric and esoteric possibilities of each work and students will be encouraged to develop their own interpretations, both in writing and in class discussions. Discussions of the various literary texts will be carried out on a weekly basis, instead of a daily basis. All secondary literature will be discussed per the day it is listed as being a discussion topic. We will move, more or less, chronologically through the various writings for the course, as we move from the attic tragedy of Sophocles to the post-Apartheid short stories of Zoe Wicomb. The theoretical readings will not, necessarily, follow this same chronological movement.

This course is a survey of modern political theory (approximately the 16 th-19 th centuries), examining the revolutionary challenges to classical and medieval political philosophy posed by such writers as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, and Marx. Our work seeks to address themes and questions such as: what is modern about modern political theory? What is human nature? What is power and how is it deployed? What are the possibilities and limits of social contract theory? What are the nature and scope of rights, duties, freedom, and equality? What is the relation between the state and the individual? What are rights and do they authorize political resistance? What are the core modern political values and how do modern political theorists grapple with their implementation? Does modernity signify an age of progress in terms of knowledge about the world and freedom for human beings? Or do modern technological, political and social developments actually constitute a new kind of prison? How do modern political thinkers conceptualize or fail to conceptualize race and gender? In what ways can modern political thought animate thinking about contemporary politics? Simultaneously, we seek to critically engage with these classic texts about politics, political subjects, and political life in two ways. First, we will question what " modern " or " modernity " means historically and theoretically; in doing so, we will interrogate practices and theories of exclusion and violence that seek to grant only some subjects and collectivities access to the presumed progress of " modernity. " Second, and in a related vein, we will analyze these texts for the discourses of race and gender they produce, both explicitly and tacitly. We pursue these objectives by examining contemporary readings of this time period and of the theorists upon whom we will focus. This is a writing-intensive course. This class will primarily be a discussion format, with the occasional lecture. Therefore regular attendance, careful preparation, and active participation are essential. You must prepare for every class by doing the reading, reflecting upon the course texts, and bringing to class issues, questions, and passages for discussion. Bring the relevant text to class, always!

Political Theory is the study of the ideas and arguments that allow us to, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "think what we are doing"-that is, to make sense of the foundations, purposes, and possibilities of politics. In this writing-intensive course, students will gain a familiarity and fluency with the main traditions, themes, and debates of Political Theory, focusing on the concepts of justice, freedom, rights, violence, and power (among others). Students will be challenged to reconsider their political commitments in light of reading, discussing, and writing about authors from diverse historical backgrounds and ideological perspectives. In this way, students will themselves participate in the tradition of Political Theory.

Ethical Perspectives, 2016

ethical perspectivesjune 2016 and with considerable insight. Their book would be particularly valuable for students of political philosophy. Curiously both authors operate out of a John Rawlsian perspective. John A. Dick Leuven Andrew Fiala (ed.). The Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 288 pp. This book has an ambitious goal: "[...] to offer an overview of the field [of political philosophy] and the depth of the issues" (2). The collection is aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries, and includes a number of interesting companions: Philosophy of Mind (386 pp.), Philosophy of Science (475 pp.), Continental Philosophy (417 pp.), in addition to Companions to Aristotle (418 pp.), Kant (432 pp.), Hume (447 pp.), etc. Most are very useful and some even mandatory references. Unfortunately, this volume falls short of such an ambition. It certainly does not help that it is by far the shortest in the collection, at little more than 250 pages, considering the pervasive nature of the political problems it faces and the 2500 years during which political philosophy has occupied some of the world's best minds. The volume is composed of a set of fourteen essays, a small glossary (227-254), a brief chronology (223-225) and a suggestion of 'research resources' (255-258). Contrary to expectations, the first essay, on the history of political philosophy, authored by James Alexander, is not an overview of the history of political philosophy, but a mere ten-page discussion of the respective roles of history and theory. The essay arrives at the commonsensical conclusion that "If philosophy without history is a desert, and history without philosophy is a jungle, then we certainly need something of both" (16); that is, in the end, the history of political philosophy "[...] is not political philosophy, but political philosophy is nothing without it" (30). The author, however, takes the rather shallow view that all political philosophy is but an "[...] attempt to respond to the world," so we are not assured of its real perennial philosophical value, except maybe seeing it as predecessor to current political ideas. After serving old masters such as polis, or to empire, church or state, only "[...] in the twentieth century, there were attempts to define politics (or the category of 'the political') as something in itself" (19). If the book begins with the past, the final essays go from contemporary theory to a prediction of future political philosophy. This is part of the design of the Companion series, where the last two essays are supposed to present a vision of the possible future of the subject matter. The last essays are quite original, at least in their basic ideas. Mathew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski "[...] analyze the publication record of six leading journals" (200) over 20 years to offer the informed guess that we should expect more work on global politics (202), inclusion (203) and democratic theory (203-204), the continuing presence of 'the Rawls industry' (204), and some new applied ethical-political problems (gender studies, etc.). Eduardo Mendieta writes the final essay on some of these 'trendy' subjects. 99037_Eth_Persp_2016-2_08_Bookreview.indd 350 30/05/16 13:40 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Universidade do Minho: RepositoriUM 99037_Eth_Persp_2016-2_08_Bookreview.indd 351 30/05/16 13:40

Goals » What this course aims to do Political theorists study how we live well together, and how different people, in different times and places, have answered that question differently (and thus developed different understandings of who we are, what holds us together, and what it means for us to live well). In this course, we will develop our own skill as political theorists, and expand our understanding of politics itself, through a careful study of classic works of political thought. In particular, we will focus on three recurrent puzzles explored across the history of political theory: [1] the relationship between personal reflection and political action; [2] the meanings of freedom; and [3] the ways political obligations between people(s) come to matter in our world.

I. COURSE DETAILS: Course Description: The Second World War brought about nothing short of an intellectual crisis. The occurrence of mass genocide and the use of atomic weapons threw almost everything into question. How could modern, educated, 'civilized' societies commit such atrocities? And more importantly: Could it happen again? This is not a course on political ideologies, but rather, a course on the various theoretical approaches to the problem of ideology-a problem that continues to shape the world we live in. A general consensus emerged in the postwar period that the unchecked proliferation of imperial, authoritarian, and fascist ideologies was responsible for plunging the world into violence. From this perspective, peaceful societies are those which successfully constrain the influence of ideologues and ideologies that designate some group of human beings as unworthy of subordinate. Whereas the driving problems of pre-20th century modern political theory centred on how regimes of democracy, rights, and individual freedom could be justified, these new contemporary approaches to political theory were concerned with how liberal democratic regimes collapsed into, or perhaps even facilitated, their antithesis. Still, many abandoned altogether what they felt to be an intractable study of value judgements, choosing to develop a more scientific value-free approach to issues of governance. In light of this shift to positivism in politics, a famous historian of political thought declared that normative political philosophy was dead. But the assessment was inaccurate. Many political theorists took up the challenge of examining the conditions under which citizens became susceptible to the power of harmful ideologies (ie, authoritarianism, colonialism, and empire), in order to determine how societies can be alerted to their promulgation and how political life can be insulated against their influence. Some declared victory in the postwar reformation of liberal theory; some pressed for greater democratic inclusion; some embraced ideology as inevitable; while others cast a suspicious eye on both the relativists and the positivists. In this course, we will become familiar with the great declarations and debates that shape the contemporary political landscape.