Pol Sci 1041 - Freshman Seminar: Intro to Political Theory I

Institution:

Washington University in St Louis

Subject:

Description:

Why is democracy a good form of government? What if a benevolent dictator arose who wrote and enforced laws that were just and equitable? What if she honored the sanctity of human life and its flourishing, guaranteed a full range of liberties to her citizens-including political ones, such as the right of free speech and organization (but not including the right to rule)? Given the problems of most living democracies, why wouldn't this be a better regime than a democratic one? And are people really capable of governing themselves anyway? Why should we trust them so? In short, what's so special about "democracy" and its corresponding idol, "public opinion," that people bow to them as hallowed virtues of a good society? In this class we provide a framework in which these and other central questions of political theory have been and can be addressed. This course is designed to introduce students to the main theoretical issues of Western political theory, including but not limited to the following concepts: justice, legitimacy, equality, democracy, liberty, sovereignty, and the role of history in the political and social world. In short, the questions are meant to explore the underlying assumptions and themes of contemporary politics and political science research today. The course is designed around the careful reading of primary text materials and engagement with contemporary problems of politics available on the front pages of any daily newspaper. Although designed as a two-semester class, students may enroll in either one or both. In this first semester, we lay out the fundamental themes of political theory in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics asking, among other things, what justice is and what place democracy has among other forms of government. Passing briefly onto Augustine and Aquinas' struggles with religion and civil society, we emerge in modernity with Machiavelli's Prince and question whether the "good" and the "political" are or ought to be different aims. We conclude the semester with the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke in which political legitimacy is based on the terms familiar to citizens of modernity: the right to rule is somehow related to a citizen's consent to be governed. In the spring semester, we turn to the struggle that modernity and the Enlightenment raised for issues of politics, including that of history, nature, institution building, and economics, guided by the texts of Rousseau, Hamilton and Madison, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.wustl.edu

Phone Number:

(314) 935-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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