Mar 28, 2024  
Catalogue 2019-2020 
    
Catalogue 2019-2020 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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POLI 170 - Political Theory

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)


Theorizing happens every day and encompasses a wide variety of practices. Seeking to generate perplexity about ‘the given,’ conversations engage various modes of expression that haunt the present, shape possible futures, and allow us both to theorize the political and politicize the theoretical. Andrew Davison.

 

A Critical Survey of Western Thought. A critical introductory survey of the history of some of the canonical texts in Western Political Thought, this course engages with the works of Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Kant, Tocqueville and Foucault. Our approach of these authors, who are all considered “canonical” (i.e., essential to the history of thought), is critical and contextual. How is it that these Western, white, male philosophers who wrote about freedom, equality, justice, power, government, nature, human nature, during Greek Antiquity, or the Renaissance, still permeate the way we think of these matters today? What may we still learn from them about these ideas? Is their continued influence on politics and how we think about it today, always a good thing, or deserved? What grants them such authority and with what effects? How did they think of gender, race, class, and how does this influence political visions of today? We explore major debates in Political Theory, understanding politics not just as the locus of power incarnated in governmental institutions, but more broadly as organizing power relations and norms throughout our everyday lives. Political theory is understood as the practice of engaging conceptually and critically with politics. Claire Sagan.

Course Format: CLS



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