Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
Summer 2017 PSCI181 Modern Political Thought
Summer 2017 PSCI181 Modern Political Thought
Summer 2017 PSCI181 Modern Political Thought
Summer 2017 PSCI181 Modern Political Thought
Summer 2017 PSCI181 Modern Political Thought
Juman KimRelated Papers
These are past syllabi from 2004-2009, when I taught as a visiting Assistant Professor at Smith College, as Preceptor (sole instructor) in the Core Curriculum at Columbia, and as an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at CUNY-York. It does not include classes taught 2010 onwards at Queen's University, the University of Graz, McGill University, or (my current institution) Pace University.
This module offers an in-depth study of the theory and practice of religious toleration in the Early Modern Period (16th & 17th centuries). The module covers classic texts, such as Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, but also spends a good deal of time exploring the thought of lesser-known figures in this area: Mary Astell, Pierre Bayle, Jean Bodin, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Sebastian Castellio, Margaret Cavendish, Confucius, Lady Montagu, Roger Williams, etc. The main purpose of the course is to try to understand the variety of arguments offered both for and against religious tolerance in the Early Modern Period, the historical background or context informing these arguments, and the relationship between these arguments and the actual practice of religious tolerance or intolerance.
"Syllabus for an undergraduate senior seminar on modern social & political theory—or, to view it from another angle, the social & political theory of modernity (University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2012)"
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to a variety of approaches and issues in political philosophy. Half of the class will be devoted to reading and commenting on primary texts such as: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The other half focuses on the secondary literature. After examining in detail each of these classic texts, we shall explore various ways in which they have been interpreted by several main schools: contextualist (Quentin Skinner and his disciples), post-modern (Sheldon Wolin and his disciples), Straussian (Leo Strauss and his disciples), feminist (Susan M. Okin, etc.), and intellectual history (Isaiah Berlin etc.), and conceptual history (Koselleck). On a general level, this course has several pedagogical aims. First, it seeks to provide an overview of a few canonical texts and authors. Second, the course seeks to help students develop the capacity to engage in advanced textual exegesis and to critically evaluate alternative approaches and interpretive methods.
Course Description This course will introduce you to a range of issues concerning the kinds of communities— political, social, moral, and religious—that human beings construct for themselves and the values that inform and define such communities. We will study ideas and arguments that have played a formative role in the political and cultural history of our time. To do so, we will discuss works that exemplify critical thinking about cultures, institutions, and practices in order to reflect more globally on what it means to be an active and engaged citizen. Course readings include passages from the Bible, the Qur'an, and works
The modern state is the predominant basis on which political authority and power are constructed across the world today. Where there is no modern state, there tends to be civil war or occupation by other states. Where modern states are ineffective, politics is unstable and sometimes violent, and governments struggle to manage the economy. The first section of this paper looks at the origins of the modern state, the arguments that were first used to justify it, and the dangers and dilemmas that the power of the modern state created in politics. Within modern states, representative democracy has become the predominant form of government in the world. It excites because it appears to offer equality, liberty and self-rule, but it also frequently disappoints in practice as it rarely does realise these values and the goods it promises frequently clash with each other. The second section of the paper looks at the origins of representative democracy in the United States, the paradoxes of the rise of the United States as a democratic society, and the kinds of politics created by representative democracy today in view of the expectations about the ‘rule of the people’ that accompany it. The final section of the paper examines the coherence and persuasiveness of alternatives to, and critiques of, modern democracy and the state, and the nature of politics as disagreement.
Michael Zuckert's dismissal of Burlamaqui and Hutcheson as inspiration for the Declaration of Independence is fatally flawed. Burlamaqui said exactly what Zuckert doubts that Burlamaqui could have said regarding the purpose of government (to secure rights). Zuckert's attempt to explain the "pursuit of happiness" in terms of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding fails, because Zuckert's two chosen examples of parallel documents both echo Hutcheson and Burlamaqui (but not Locke) on obtaining happiness; and the 1776 congressional definition of happiness includes virtue, in common with the Ciceronian tradition of Hutcheson and Burlamaqui, in opposition to Locke. In this Ciceronian tradition, rights are derived from duties, and virtue is the "perfection" of human nature, with happiness as the result. This view is prominently expressed by Burlamaqui's student Vattel, whose "The Law of Nations" was carefully followed by the Continental Congress as it went through the procedure of establishing and then declaring independence.
RELATED PAPERS
2012 •
Studia Gilsoniana
STATE VS. GOD: ON AN ATHEISTIC IMPLICATION OF EUROPEAN STATISM2015 •
2020 •
Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy
Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies2009 •
2019 •
Journal of Public Deliberation
The Troubled History of Philosophy and Deliberative Democracy2010 •
2009 •
2013 •
2019 •
2015 •
Rubikon : Journal of Transnational American Studies
Jefferson and Tocqueville on Democracy as Hemisperic ViewsRenaissance Quarterly
The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan2008 •
- Find new research papers in:
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Biology
- Health Sciences
- Ecology
- Earth Sciences
- Cognitive Science
- Mathematics
- Computer Science