Politics

Introduction to Politics This course explores the concept of politics, its origins, its character, its various meanings, and the territories it has carved for itself. It investigates what it means to think politically, to ask political questions, and to engage in political action. It ventures into various articulations, in the works of key political thinkers, of the relation between the self and the political order, taking this to be fundamental to how we construe the subjects and objects of politics today. Importantly, it sees politics as being characterized by an intense engagement with this question among others, and looks to different instantiations of this process not only in contemporary political and philosophical debates, but also in practical political action.

Issues & Approaches in Comparative Politics This course is designed as a toolbox containing the various methods and approaches available, and used by political scientists, to study major political problems, to compare them, to theorize about them, and possibly also to figure out ways to solve them. It will involve a sustained look at the importance, mechanics and problems of these practices as they pertain to issues of modernization, development and underdevelopment; violence and terrorism; globalization; revolution, protest and social movements; ethnicity and nationalism; democracy and democratization; authoritarianism and corruption; inequality; civil society; and political institutions.

Comparative Politics Focus: Contemporary U.S. This course undertakes a comparative political analysis of the political system of the United States. It seeks to familiarize students with the basic methods and approaches available in the subfield of comparative politics, with special emphasis on issues relevant to the year of presidential elections. The Democratic and Republican presidential primaries will serve as a live-case for the study of various topics from party politics to campaign finance, from institutions to civil society, from forms of government in a comparative context to the ideological spectra that define the “hot topics” in American politics today (war, immigration, disaster, taxation, campaign finance, media, etc.).

Star Crossed Lovers: Politics & Philosophy of Freedom Both the American and the French revolutions of the 18th century cried freedom in their respective languages, and ushered in at least a century-long struggle with the notion of freedom among political philosophers on the continent and beyond. It can be argued that those debates and systematizations, in all their divergences and convergences, have come to frame philosophical and political negotiations, hopes and frustrations, solidarities and rebellions, in the past century. This course attempts to map this motley inheritance that provides the fabric for many contemporary confrontations with the concept, imperative, imaginary, or enactment, if you may, of “freedom.” Beginning with a noted philosopher of the French revolution, Immanuel Kant—to whom is attributed the “invention” of the modern notion of autonomy as well as the inaugural of a certain legacy of German idealism—the course moves to thinkers who negotiate with Kant to install their own legacy. Notable among these is G.W.F. Hegel, and an entire “troubled generation” of his followers and dissenters—the Young Hegelians—the practices, concerns, restlessness, and skirmishes of whom seem uncannily similar to many of our own times. Key among these skirmishes is the debate between materialist and idealist notions of freedom—sometimes framed as a battle over the most historically and materially pertinent summoning of the Greeks to the rescue, sometimes as a lived struggle between the priority of politics and philosophy, among others. The course closes with a peculiar Young Hegelian, Karl Marx, and a Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard. Studying each philosopher’s approach sequentially, the course traces the theme of freedom throughout different variations from the 18th century revolutions to 19th century ones, with special attention to how these thinkers navigate the idealism-materialism spectrum. Unifying these thinkers in their diversity is, to quote a contemporary commentator, their insistence on “making [their work] a relevant player in the contemporary liberation drama.” This includes their focus on the relation between politics and philosophy, and their concern with what the role of the philosopher and thinker might, could and should, be in rethinking and actualizing freedom as a value, and what this may entail.

Cultural Perspectives
Colonial Loves: Cultural Politics of Indian Cinema This course broaches cinema in British India as an industry whose political history under and beyond colonialism can be traced through an analysis that draws upon critical theory, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. The questions of production, distribution, consumption, and labor, among others, within this peculiar mode of the culture industry will start us off. The course will converge from various directions on the organic and inorganic relations between love, affect, and colonial power within the experiences of coloniality, postcoloniality, neocoloniality, globalization, both within and outside the geographical confines of South Asia, as illuminating not only, a la Habermas, the colonization of a life-world, but also exposing colonization as a life-world. We will explore how time, and not merely space, is present and functional in cinematic landscapes—timescapes—and what this can tell us about dominant narratives of liberation, partition, development, growth, violence, memory, forgetting, loving, losing, being, becoming, etc. that are thus produced in the South Asian subcontinent. The hope is to neither simply use colonial relations to read cinema, nor to only use cinema as a lens into the various scapes of colonial and postcolonial existence, but to see both these moments as continuous and necessary. We will initially dabble with historical accounts of the arrival of cinema in the subcontinent in the early 20th century against the backdrop of other artistic, cultural, economic, and political negotiations underway at that time. We will then trace these dynamics over the past century of cinema in India by surveying films produced in Bollywood that evidence a variety of themes of class, religion, language, sexuality, gender, caste, race, etc. as they represent and refigure love, romance, and desire— and the subjects and objects of these—in the colonized life-world. To these films will be appended short readings. Students will write short essays on assigned films and readings, and work in small groups to do research that features the cinema and media industries of other third world, postcolonial, and post-imperial countries. This course has no prerequisites.

Politics, Memory, History The thematic focus of this course is memory and its relation to politics. It broaches two questions: What is the role of memory in politics and political theory? What is the politics of memory? Primarily, this requires beginning with recognizing memory as one of our fairly common human capacities, in order to appreciate its role in our political actions. How do political beings (such as us) deal with the past? What (and whose) memory is at work in the stories we tell ourselves and in those that are told us? How can we imagine a future that is different from the past and the present? The aim of the course is to furnish us with some tools to understand, and respond to, the realities that we inherit and create for ourselves. Beginning with trying to understand what memory is, the course sends out its tentacles to history, identity, ideology, violence, memorials, urban life, political change, struggle and hope (and whatever else you can think of). It will explore, in short, how memory mediates the personal and the political, and what this can tell us about our abilities and capacities as political animals. Through select thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries whose work explores this mediation, it deals both with the politics of memory and the memory of politics.

Modern Political Ideologies This course is a survey of modern and contemporary political ideologies and worldviews. It begins with an exploration of the term “ideology” and its importance to the study and practice of politics. How are ideas are composed to form ideologies and then structure the world for us in turn? What is it about us as human beings that requires ideologies? Are ideologies only a modern phenomenon? We see how the key concepts of politics are framed within each ideology we encounter, en route to figuring out how each ideology structures the very domain we call politics, and of democratic politics in particular. The course also hopes to make us more attentive in our use of words and categories in politics, and to see the nuances within categories we employ in our everyday lives, such as “liberal” and “conservative.” We will sample texts representative of, and responsive to, ideologies including liberalism (John Locke to Isaac Kramnick), conservatism (Edmund Burke to Phyllis Schlafly), socialism (Charles Fourier to Tom Hayden), anarchism (Henry David Thoreau to Emma Goldman), fascism (Benito Mussolini to Andrew MacDonald), feminism (Mary Wollstonecraft to Chandra Mohanty), environmentalism (Ralph Waldo Emerson to Vandana Shiva), nationalisms old and new (Joseph Mazzini to Benedict Anderson to Edward Said), and globalism (Samuel Huntington to Fred Dallmayr).

American Idol: Searching for Superstar Political Thinkers This course is a historical survey of American political thought from the founding to the present. Modelled on the notorious TV show, this course stages a contest for the title of American Idol among a wide array of figures, ranging from the Puritans to Tony Kushner, and from Horatio Alger to Malcolm X, who have made the cut to the course to compete for the title. Together we will examine questions like: What is “American” about American political thought? How has this identity come to be and what has it represented over the course of its evolution? How have different thinkers envisioned and critiqued the shape of the American state and culture? What makes democracy American and America democratic? What are the peculiar ways in which time and space interact to yield the concepts we call America and the American Dream? What negotiations with history does the American celebration of newness, possibility, hope, and amnesia entail? We will discuss a variety of works, in forms ranging from political treatises, journalism, philosophical writing, speeches, essays, autobiographies, fiction, poems, Supreme Court decisions, music, plays, and films. This plurality of forms—not to mention the course title’s unabashed debt to features of American popular culture— will force us to center on the relation between various forms of media and political consciousness at an individual and collective level. Through the course, we will familiarize ourselves with the ideas of some key figures in the history of American thought, practise theoretical, and critical engagement with them and the problems they are addressing, learn some skills of democratic citizenship, explore our own views and political identity, and choose an American Idol for ourselves!

Spirited Away: Questions of God in Politics Beginning with Marx’s views on the farce of liberal secularism, and Weber’s treatment of the de-spiriting of modern life, the course winds through 20th and 21st century political theory and its attempts to understand the history of this disenchantment, its sources and meanings, and the subsequent attempts to re-enchant our political existences. It works with the premise that while the mostly destructive role of religion in contemporary global politics may tempt us to elevate secularism, this judgment may be too facile. Secularization and its effects need to be studied historically in order to understand that the state of the world today may owe something to the very process in which we seek redemption. Politics and theology have always shared an object—the city—the former with its roots in the Greek word polis, and the latter in the desire to establish the dominion of God over the earth as a trailer of coming attractions. In the modern era, the artistic and cultural secularism attempted by the Renaissance blossoms to create some walls in this city that force an exit of religion from politics. The course will move through retellings of the story of secular modernity by intellectual historians, to end with theorists who seek to go beyond the secular/religious split, whether by travelling with Marx to contend with the re-emergence of political theology, or by re-examining St. Paul, among others; atheists join in the chorus of voices with orthodox theologians in order to think past capitalism and other terrors. What is desirable or not about this is a question we will together try to answer. Notable among the thinkers featured are Giorgio Agamben, Talal Asad, Alain Badiou, Hans Blumenberg, William Connolly, Jacques Derrida, Marcel Gauchet, Julia Lupton, Susan Neiman, and Slavoj Zizek.

Critical Legal Studies: The First Amendment An advanced seminar examining the first amendment rights of speech, press, religion, and assembly, this course assumes some knowledge of judicial process and the U.S. political system. Theory and history are explored through close analysis of landmark court cases in particular areas. The course argues for a pedagogy that will bring to life the principles of democratic process and their utility and vitality in promoting diversity, dignity, and debate in contemporary life. Prerequisite: Politics 100, 101, 214, 217, or Social Science 214.

Politics by Other Means I: Social Movements and Political Action The course explores the ways in which human beings create politics through collective action, ordinary and heroic, that finds its logics outside of given institutions, beyond realpolitik as we know it. By looking at social movements across the globe, and sporting different ideological, moral and pragmatic frames, the course aspires to an alternate formulation of “real” politics, what it can and does mean, where it happens and who participates in it. The course has two broad components. The first involves a review of the literature on political and social movements, and addressing questions such as: When and why movements occur? Who joins or supports movements? Who remains and who drops out? What is the role of emotions and ideas in movements? How are movements organized? What do movements do? What are movements seeking to move? How are contemporary movements different from older ones? How do movements change, grow, and decline? What do they accomplish? Some of the historical cases studied in order to address these questions include: the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the labor movement, the gay liberation movement, the Iranian revolution, pro-life and pro-choice movements, the green movement, WTO protests, Catholic feminism, the nuclear freeze movement, farmworkers’ movements, and the New Left. The second component, titled the Social Action Workshop, is the practical aspect of the course. Students, in groups, map a specified region of Berkshire County for the social and political action groups that exist here. They construct an inventory of these spaces, and apply the questions we broach in the classroom to a movement or group of their choice.

Politics by Other Means II: Citizens, Soldiers, Revolutionaries The poet Stephen Dunn wrote, “One man’s holiness, another’s absurdity.” War, democracy, and revolution, though distinct concepts, have interesting continuities, not least of which can be found in the human beings who are at once subjects and objects of these experiences: citizens, soldiers, revolutionaries, and permutations thereof. These words can connote either discrete events with lessons to be learnt, or realities that never seem to have either beginnings or ends, depending on where we find ourselves on the terrain of class, race, gender, nationality, power, ideology, and various other inexorable accidents of time and space. This course continues the inquiry into the ways in which human beings create politics that was begun in Politics by Other Means I: Social Movements and Collective Action. It seeks to explore the materialities of the wars we fight: by placing the strategic and empirical realities of wars in a framework of the calls of duty, obligation, love, and death, to which we respond. What is the relation between war and politics, and how has it changed over time? What and who makes a war a war? What can a state demand of whom, and why? How are these demands made and received? Is what is worth living for, also worth dying for, also worth killing for? Is it even possible to be a subject of something without being subject to something? Readings drawn from politics, history, philosophy, literature, and popular media will take us through various questions into the relation between war, democracy, and revolution, and in what ways the subjectivities of citizen, soldier, revolutionary, rebel, terrorist, freedom-fighter have come to be over history and across the globe.

Hope Against Hope: Marx After Marx This course is devoted to close readings of Karl Marx and two Marxists, Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin. Stepping away from neat mechanistic readings of Marx, this course engages with the messy nature and substance of possibility and hope in Marxist thought. Appreciating the intriguing relation of Marx to modernity and modernism, the course delves into what it might have meant for Marx to subvert dominant philosophers for whom matter had no weight, to unsettle modernity’s conceits of progress and happiness, and to then postulate revolution, communism and hope on the basis, and not to the exclusion, of very heavy, often very wounded, human bodies. Marx stands as a significant diagnostician of alienation and the decrepitude of a world whose ethical, political, material, and spiritual reality tends to slip through the fingers of precisely those hands that create it. Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin worked on the costs and conditions of possibility, enchantment, and hope within capitalism, rethinking categories of dialectics, relation, history, culture, class, art, faith, experience, matter, spirit, time, and space to lend Marx currency in times that had far from borne out his hope. The main featured works for this conversation are On the Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, Scorpion and Felix, and Grundrisse by Karl Marx; Soul and Form and Tailism and the Dialectic by Georg Lukacs; and Origin of German Tragic Drama and Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin. The course will also bring in other Marxist political thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Lucien Goldmann, Rosa Luxembourg, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Slavoj Zizek as needed. Prerequisites: Sophomore standing or instructor’s permission.

Politics Tutorial Under these course numbers, juniors and seniors design tutorials to meet their particular interests and programmatic needs. A student should see the prospective tutor to define an area of mutual interest to pursue either individually or in a small group. A student may register for no more than one tutorial in any semester.