Spring 2001 Professor Balbus

Summer 2001 Professor Balbus

Political Science 120: Introduction to Political Theory

This course introduces you to many of the most important and contested western political concepts and is designed to encourage rigorous and critical thinking with and about them. These concepts are “political” in the two-fold sense that they enable us think about politics and they help constitute what counts as politics and its possibilities in the first place. Thus this course is as much about the politics of discourse as it is about the discourse of politics.

It is also designed to encourage awareness of the role of political concepts in our popular culture and thus in our everyday lives. Political concepts are embedded not only in our govern- mental institutions and the texts associated with or devoted to them, but also in our music, movies, television programs, commercials as well as other media that are not normally thought of as “political”. Students will be required to write two short (5 to 7 double-spaced typed pages) in which they identify and analyze the presence of political concepts in a number of those media. Mid-term and final essay examinations are also required.

All the required reading is collected in a packet that should be purchased no later than the first day of class.

I. Introduction: Concepts of Politics and the Politics of Concepts

Week 1

Required: Connolly, “Introduction” and “Essentially Contested Concepts in Politics”

II. Contested Concepts

A. “Essential” Concepts

1. Human Nature

Week 2

Required: Selections from Hobbes, Leviathan; Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality; Marx, Private Property and Communism”; Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

2. Utopia

Week 3

Required: Selection from Plato, The Republic; Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, chapter 9; Moylan, Demand The Impossible, chapters 2 and 8

3. Freedom

Week 4

Required: J.S. Mill, “Introduction” to On Liberty; selections from Rousseau, The Social Contract; Marx, On the Jewish Question, Part I.

4. Power

Week 5

Required: Bachrach and Baratz, selections from Power and Poverty; Arendt, “Communicative Power”; Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power”

5. Legitimacy

Week 6

Required: Selections from Rousseau, The Social Contract; Weber, “The Bases of the Legitimacy of an Order”; Lipset, “Social Conflict, Legitimacy, and Democracy”; Schaar, “Legitimacy in the Modern State”

6. Justice

Week 7

Required:; Hayek, “Equality, Value and Merit”; Rawls, selections from 7 A Theory of Justice; Marx, selection from “Critique of the Gotha Program”; Nietzsche, selections from The Genealogy of Morals

7. Democracy

Week 8

Required: The Port Huron Statement; Michels, selections from Political Parties; Barber, selections from Strong Democracy

8. Community, Identity and Difference

Week 9

Required: Unger, selections from Knowledge and Politics; Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference”; Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition”

B. Contemporary Concepts

9. (Market) Capitalism

Week 10

Required: Friedman, “The Power of the Market”; Marx, “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society”; Polanyi, selections from The Great Transformation

10. Civil Society

Week 11

Required: Ehrenberg, selections from Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea; Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

11. Modernity

Week 12

Required: Marx, The Communist Manifesto, Part I; selections from Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, selections from Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality; selection from Ellul, The Technological Society

12. Rationalism

Week 13

Required: Descartes, selections from The Principles of Philosophy; Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”; Burke, selections from Reflections on The French Revolution Gadamer, selections from Truth and Method

13. Nationalism

Week 14

Required: Mortimer, ed., People, Nation and State, Parts II and V