PolSci 382 – Modern Political Thought – Syllabus
This is an introduction to modern political theory from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. The modern era begins as the question of legitimacy is posed in a new way: if God is not the source of political authority, what is? If political institutions are man-made, how should they be changed? What is the best way to live collectively, and how might we know? These are among the questions addressed by political theorists from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, and among the questions we will be addressing in this course.
PolSci 386 – Contemporary Political Theory: Capitalism & Its Discontents. Syllabus
This course is an introduction to the history and theory modern capitalism, from its development in the 18th century to its latest crisis. This is a course in political theory, and no particular background in economics is required. What is required is the willingness to read texts slowly and carefully, and to come to class ready and willing to discuss them. There will be reading assignments for each week, as well as frequent written assignments. These assignments vary in length but will be kept within the realm of the possible. Most weeks, the writing assignment will consist of a brief in-class exercise, designed to help focus our attention and class discussion.
PolSci 386 – Contemporary Political Theory: The Politics of Monstrosity – Syllabus
This course – while not strictly speaking a course about monsters – proceeds from the assumption that monsters (and what is considered monstrous) form a starting point from which to ask questions of political and theoretical significance. In particular, we shall raise questions concerning the social construction of race, gender and identity, and the nature of social norms more generally. To that end, we will draw on the work of various authors, many of whom are associated with an intellectual movement broadly known as post-structuralism. Although this movement has over the years aroused the suspicions of many (both inside and outside of academia), it has also done much to draw our attention to seemingly marginal formations (including those that we deem monstrous) and their importance in the making of a social and political relations. More than a course about monsters, then, this is an introduction to contemporary political theory, but we shall allow monsters to be our guide.
PolSci 300 – Western European Politics
As the historian Timothy Garton Ash put it, Europe is currently facing three crises: a crisis of capitalism, a crisis of European integration, a crisis of democratic sovereignty. To help us make sense of these crises, we begin this course with a brief review of European history from the rise of nation-states in the 19th century to the establishment of social democracy after the Second World War and the development of the “European project” in the latter half of the 20th century. Once this basic narrative is in place, we will focus our attention on some of the present-day challenges faced by various populations across Western Europe, specifically.
PolSci 814 – Foundational Texts of Political Theory (Graduate Proseminar) – Syllabus
This course is an advanced introduction to the field of political theory. As such, its aim is really twofold. First, the course serves as an introduction to major figures and questions in the tradition of Western political thought. Specifically, we will engage the writings of Plato, Machiavelli and Nietzsche and, through them, some of basic questions that have occupied political theorists (e.g. what is the best regime? how is power acquired or maintained? what is the relation between truth and power?). Secondly, the course serves also as an introduction to the academic study of political theory as it developed in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century. Alongside the so-called “primary” texts by Plato, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, therefore, we will also be engaging the work of their scholarly interpreters, and discussing some of the interpretive and political debates between them. Ultimately, we may find that this division between “primary” and “secondary” literatures does not hold, just as we may call into doubt some of the other divisions we will encounter (e.g., politics v. philosophy, political science v. political theory, philosophy v. literature). For now, though, we’ll let it stand.
Courses taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Political Science 791E – French Theory or Fashionable Nonsense? (Graduate Seminar)
On May 18, 1996, the front page of the New York Times carried this unusual headline: “Postmodern gravity deconstructed, slyly.” The story? Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at NYU, had recently published an article in the well-known humanities journal Social Text with the alluring title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” A few weeks later, Sokal revealed in another journal what the editors of Social Text had obviously missed: his article was pure nonsense, a parody of postmodernist jargon laced with mathematical formulas fancy enough to mystify the editors of Social Text, too eager to agree with a denunciation of the Enlighenment and so easily impressed by an invocation of the latest French philosophy.
“Sokal’s hoax,” as it came to be known, would be the stuff of cocktail party conversations and academic conferences for years to come. There were those who celebrated Sokal for having publicly revealed that the emperor had no clothes, and there were those who tried to defend the editors of Social Text, accusing Sokal of betraying their trust or exposing Sokal’s lack of serious understanding of the philosophers he was trying to expose.
Whether or not it is only “fashionable nonsense,” as Sokal would later call it, there is no doubt that the poststructuralist philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and others has been fashionable, in the United States a least. There is hardly a university department in the humanities and social sciences in the United States that has not been shaped by this body of thought, and its legacy can felt in political discussions of a range of issues, from questions of colonialism’s legacy to identity politics and gender equality. But while poststructuralism (or “French theory,” as it has been called derisively) is embraced by many, it is decried by others as irrelevant (at best) or dangerous (at worst). In this course, our aim will be neither to praise nor to bury French theory, but to acquaint ourselves with some of its major figures and developments, in both the French and American contexts.
Political Science 791G – Karl Marx: Reading Capital/Reading Capital
“The philosophers have heretofore only interpreted the world in various ways; [but] the point is to change it.” It was Friedrich Engels, not Karl Marx, who inserted the conjunction “but” in the now famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. The opposition between the two phrases was implicit, of course, but in preparing the manuscript for publication Engels felt it necessary to draw the contrast more starkly, thereby turning Marx’s philosophical fragment into a political injunction. Engels interpreted Marx’s statement, and in so doing he also changed it.
What is at stake in this rewording of the Eleventh Thesis? On the one hand, Marx’s friend and colleague was only drawing out something that was already there, clarifying what would otherwise have been an awkward phrase. On the other hand, in deciding thus on the proper meaning of the phrase, Engels was also preempting the philosophical questions posed by this very awkwardness: What is the relation between interpreting and changing the world, and what is the position from which Marx is able to contrast the two? If there exists a break between the fragment scribbled in a notebook and the revolutionary call to arms, how should it be understood?
In many ways, the fate of the Eleventh Thesis is emblematic of both the promise and dangers of Marx’s critique. In his lifetime, Marx was famously committed to the “ruthless criticism of everything existing”; it is in this spirit that the Eleventh Thesis was written, and it is this spirit that it summons. But while Marx’s intervention moved us beyond the dogmatism of earlier times by allowing us to imagine a different world, its legacy has not been without its own dogmatism. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Marx’s apologists and detractors alike ceased to read Marx and quoted him instead. When the century came to an end and the Soviet Union collapsed, they ceased even to do that. But today, as we encounter Marx’s phrase in the wake of Marxism’s demise, it is possible again to hear to the provocation that Engels unwittingly quelled. And in these times of unprecedented crisis in global capitalism, it is not only possible but imperative that we heed the call and ask ourselves what Marx’s critique of political economy has to offer: what is its legacy, what is its potential.
This seminar is an introduction to Marx’s work, with a focus on his last major published work: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume 1). Although Capital will serve as the principal text for the course, the first few weeks will be devoted to some of Marx’s earlier interventions, including his essay On the Jewish Question, The German Ideology and his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. We will then turn to reading Capital, before considering critical readings of Marx by Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida and Kojin Karatani. In the last few weeks we return to Marx’s text in light of the questions we will have encountered along the way.