FALL 2001 PROFESSOR BALBUS

POLITICAL SCIENCE 293: POSSIBLE POLITICAL SYSTEMS

This course offers a dose of visionary political thinking as an antidote for the pervasive political pessimism from which we suffer. More specifically, it elaborates a vision of an ideal society characterized by sexual, political and technological liberation. At the same time, it is designed to encourage serious discussion about the possibility of--and thus the obstacles to--the actualization of this ideal. Students will be expected to familiarize themselves with the case for feminism, participatory democracy, and ecology as well as address the arguments that can be and have been made against the desirability and/or possibility of these forms of liberation. Three short papers will be required.

The following required readings are available for purchase at Circle Center Bookstore:

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia

Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution

E. Gene Frankland and Donald Schoonmaker, Between Protest and Power, Steven

Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, and The Critique of Deep Ecology, will

be available for purchase from Professor Balbus.

Week 1 I. Introduction: Obstacles to the Utopian Imagination

Weeks 2-4 II. A Feminist, Ecological and Participatory Democratic Utopia

Required: Callenbach, Ecotopia

III. The Anti-Utopian Arguments

Weeks 5-7 A. The Case Against Feminism

Required: Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy

Recommended:

Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur

Margaret Mead, Male and Female

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

H.R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex

Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, Women, Culture

and Society

-2-

Rayna Reiter, Toward an Anthropology of Women

Isaac D. Balbus, Marxism and Domination, chaps. 2 & 5

Christine Delphy, Close To Home: A Materialist Analysis of

Women’s Oppression

Catherine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering

Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate

Peggy Sandy, Female Power and Male Dominance

Martin King Whyte, The Status of Women in Preindustrial Societies

Weeks 8-10 B. The Case Against Participatory Democracy

Required: Dahl, After the Revolution?

Recommended:

Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Looking Forward: Participatory

Economics for the Twenty-First Century

David Schweikart, Capitalism or Worker Control?

Julian LeGrand and Saul Estrin, eds., Market Socialism

Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory

Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism

George C. Benello and Dimitrios I. Roussopoulos, The Case for

Participatory Democracy

Steve Shalom, ed., Socialist Visions

Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy

Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale

Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy

Weeks 11-13 C. The Case Against Deep Ecology

Required: “The Critique of Deep Ecology”

Recommended:

Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle

Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy

Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Defending the Earth

Richard Neuhaus, In Defense of People

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision

E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

George Sessions and Bill Duvall, Deep Ecology

-3-

Andrew McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep

Ecology

David Pepper, Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice

Andrew Dobson and Paul Lucardie, The Politics of Nature

Balbus, Marxism and Domination, chaps. 8-9

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

Robin Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards

an Ecocentric Approach

Weeks 14-15 IV. Contemporary Practice and Future Prospects

Required: Frankland and Schoonmaker, Between Protest and Power

Recommended:

Fritjof Capra and Charlene Spretnak, Green Politics

Jonathan Porritt, Seeing Green

Werner Hulsberg, The German Greens

Balbus, Marxism and Domination, chap. 10

Programe of the German Green Party

Helmut Wiesenthal, Realism in Green Politics

William E. Coleman, Jr. & William E. Coleman, Sr., A Rhetoric of

the People: The German Greens and the New Politics

Wolfgang Rudig, ed., Green Politics One

Daniel Coleman, Ecopolitics: Building a Green Society