2007–2008 Politics Courses
American Politics and Democracy: A Historical Introduction
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
What does it mean to be an American? What rights and freedoms come with being an American citizen? What are Americans’ obligations to one another? How democratic are we? How democratic do we want to be?
In different forms, these questions have animated American politics and political contestation since the founding of the Republic. And the answers Americans have given have changed over time. This course examines the development of the American political system, paying special attention to how American institutions have both reflected and influenced these shifting ideas of national identity, citizenship, and democratic legitimacy.
We begin with the foundations of American politics, placing special emphasis on the Constitution and the debates surrounding it. We then go on to explore how our institutions have developed over time, how they work, and how they continue to change. Finally, we will consider the question of how democratic the American political system actually is, or is likely to become. Throughout, we will follow the current, very early, phase of the 2008 presidential election, to see how these and other questions are playing out in the present.
Racial Politics and Political Thought in 20th-Century United States
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Spring
How have Americans understood race over the last century? How have we defended, accommodated, and/or struggled against racial oppression? How have our racial hierarchies shaped our political institutions, ideas, and loyalties?
It is hard to miss the rhetoric of "fairness" and "equality" in American public life. In 1840 Alexis de Tocqueville claimed that "equality of conditions" was the "basic fact" that shaped Americans’ political principles and accounted for "the whole course" of American society. Many twentieth-century American scholars have agreed, arguing that American political development has been largely determined by a fundamental “consensus” around bedrock, liberal values. And today's American politicians almost universally invoke such values when seeking votes and support for their policies.
But it is also hard to miss how frequently the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality. Easily the most glaring example is the fact of racial domination in America’s history and present. Has this been some kind of aberration, to be corrected by hewing more closely to our basic principles? Or does it reveal that America isn’t so "liberal" (or at least not exclusively so) after all? Alternatively, does the logic of our liberalism somehow breed exclusions and oppressions?
In this course we will try to understand the persistence and transformations of racism and racial hierarchy in the United States over the last century, exploring how racial ideas and politics have shaped—and been shaped by—political ideology, party competition, social movements, the welfare state, and international relations. In doing so we will explore the fundamental questions about America’s political culture outlined above. More importantly, we will try to determine what all of this might mean for America’s potential to become a truly inclusive, democratic society.
First-Year Studies: Africa in the International System
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
Far too often, investigations of the politics, economics, and societies of sub-Saharan Africa present African states and their populations in isolation from the international system. This course investigates the politics of African states and their populations as part of world politics from colonialism to formal democracy to explore the myriad connections between advanced industrial states such as the United States and geographically distant and economically less-developed African states. We engage in a rigorous examination of the politics and economics of colonial and postcolonial rule and then move to focus on the genesis and impact of recent economic and political transitions. Key questions include: How are postcolonial African states distinctive from other postcolonial states? In what ways are postcolonial states linked to their former colonizers? How do ethnicity, class, and gender identities play into contemporary politics? What role have Western states played in the presence or absence of democracy in African states? How do the politics of patronage affect processes of political and economic change, such as democratization and the implementation of structural adjustment programs? What impact have international financial institutions played in aggravating or alleviating conditions of poverty? What choices and tradeoffs do Africa’s postcolonial leaders and citizens face, and what role do African states and their citizens play in the international community? This course will not investigate the experiences of all African countries but will address these questions by drawing on the experiences of a number of states including Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa. We will draw on a variety of methodological and disciplinary approaches to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of contemporary African politics as they are embedded in and affect international politics.
The Legitimacy of Modernity? Basic Texts in Social Theory
Level: Open
Semester: Year
What is modernity? What institutions, social forms, and cultural practices differentiate modern from pre- or postmodern societies? Has modernity contributed to human well-being, individual autonomy, and political democracy? Has it led to unprecedented levels of exploitation, degradation, and deracination? Would we be better off if our societies fully realized its potentials or instead entered a postmodern epoch? Is Western social history exemplary of the modernization process as such or are there multiple modernities? Is modernity inseparable from colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and the exploitation of non-Western societies? Or has European modernity been provincialized to the point where it furnishes the categories in terms of which struggles against imperialism and exploitation are now fought? Social theory is a tradition of discourse that seeks answers to questions like these. It emerged through efforts to understand the practices and institutions that produced previously unimaginable social transformations at a dizzying pace in European modernization: capitalism, the centralization of state power, the rule of law, bureaucracy, a nation-state system, democratization, colonialism, mass mobilization and revolution, a highly individualistic and egalitarian culture, religious diversity, etc. These institutions still constitute the basic structure of our social worlds, and in this course we study thinkers who charted these social worlds as they emerged and still provide us with highly illuminating analytic categories and interpretive lenses with which to understand our current social worlds. These theorists of society gave birth to the modern social science disciplines we still recognize but at the same time did not limit themselves by narrow definitions of disciplinary competence. The continuing relevance of the classic texts will be borne out as we turn in the last portion of the course to examine a number of sources of modern social structure that were mainly neglected by earlier works in social theory—including race, gender, sexuality, and imperialism—and find old categories employed to illuminate neglected phenomena. Authors studied include canonical thinkers like Smith, Tocqueville, Marx, Émile Durkheim, Weber and Freud, and contemporary heirs like Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, W. E. B. DuBois, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Michael Hart and Antonio Negri, Judith Butler, Nancy Chodorow, and Catherine McKinnon. As we subject their texts and theories to close scrutiny, we will also address a number of questions that cut across and connect their theories, questions that range from the methodological to the practical. Is the human social world infinitely complex, so that the theorist can only project order onto it? How do we combine the diverse perspectives and conclusions to understand our own social world? To what degree do modern social worlds depend on their constitutive orders being misunderstood by those whose action animates this order? Should we be suspicious of our intuitive understanding of morality and justice and treat them simply one among many functional social systems? How much room for individuality and autonomy does society leave? Are there structural limits on the possibilities for democratic self-governance and social reform?
Collective Violence and Political Change
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
Is violence and violent struggle a part of ordinary politics? The answer to this question has a profound impact on the way we view protest activity and the actions of states; it affects the way we understand struggles for greater rights, struggles for power, and the resolution of those struggles. This course challenges the assumption that violence is simply the end of politics by investigating the uses of violence as an integral part of political processes from the repression of demonstrations to war and terrorism. We investigate central questions concerning the role of violence and its short-term impact on politics. What leads states to choose war or organizations to choose violent means to press their demands? Are certain regimes more likely to engage in violence than others, or do different regimes simply employ different forms of violence? Under what conditions will nonviolent movement tactics be most effective? Under what conditions do actors tend to move toward violence? Should countries such as the United States support struggles for democracy if they seem destined to lead to greater violence in the short term? How can violence be measured? Are states losing their relative monopoly on violence? These questions are central not only to important theoretical and philosophical debates, but in the current political climate, they are increasingly central to pressing policy discussions and crucial political and humanitarian choices. How we as individuals and the United States as a state view violence and how we respond to it can have dramatic consequences for international relations, for states, and for their citizens around the world.
Prior relevant course work required.
Justice, Legitimacy, Power, and Action
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable return of grand theories in the human sciences. While many writers in the first half of the century either celebrated or bemoaned the death of comprehensive theories of society and politics, a number of more recent theorists revived this tradition by writing systematic works on social justice, human flourishing, political legitimacy, and the organization of social power. These works not only revive the tradition of grand theorizing but also show that theory is uniquely relevant in illuminating the most pressing political issues of our age. Foremost among these works are those representing five approaches: liberalism, critical theory, neo-Aristolianism, poststructuralism, and feminism. This seminar examines these five frameworks for normative and social analysis, focusing on the issue of how to understand power, action, legitimacy, and justice in contemporary society. We will read works by John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and feminist critics of each. Issues to be discussed include: What is the content of social justice, and can it be realized in contemporary social conditions? Can democracy be realized in advanced capitalist societies, and, if so, what institutional and social forms does it require? Should we view the process of Western modernization as representing genuine moral and political progress or simply as replacing older with newer and more insidious forms of domination? Does a feminist perspective contribute to, modify, or lead to the rejection of contemporary theories of justice, action, legitimacy, and power? Does the experience of the twentieth century with genocide, imperialism, starvation, dislocation, and war suggest the need to shift to a postnational or cosmopolitan way of understanding justice, legitimacy, power, and action?