Courses
Course Archive
Autumn 2007
Please find below a list of courses offered by the Department during the Autumn 2007 quarter.
20407. The Environment and International Security. Geopolitical thinking is foundational to International Relations theory. Control over territory and access to strategic natural resources have been key components of state power and causes of international conflict. Today's geopolitics include a wider range of topics; issues like climate change and ozone depletion have become objects of international concern and contestation. Some authors go so far as to claim that environmental degradation will be the primary cause of violent international conflict in the twenty-first century. This course explores these claims by surveying a wide range of theoretical literatures on the relationship between environmental issues and international security, as well as examining historical cases of environmental conflict and cooperation. E. Meierding.
20507. Migration and the Politics of Economic Development. International migration is reshaping politics, economics and social relations around the world. Migrant workers play a significant role in the economies of country of origin and host countries, which affects immigration policy and economic development. This course examines the theoretical and empirical models linking migration and the process of economic development and critically assesses the economic and political benefits and consequences of immigration in migrant sending and receiving countries and evaluates the implications for policymaking. L. Duquette.
20907. Social-identifications, the State, and Violence in Civil Wars. This course surveys the social scientific literature on civil wars and engages with three core themes in civil war studies. These three broader themes are identity-formation and violence, state-building (/state collapse) and violence, and forms or types of violence in internal conflicts or civil wars. S. Kechichian.
21008. Religion in American Politics. This course introduces the study of religion in American Politics and focuses primarily on the impact of Christian Protestantism on the American political landscape. Religion plays an important role in American Politics. Since the nation's inception different religious and nonreligious groups have argued over what role religion should play in American public life. In contemporary America, religion has transcended the objective purview of man's immortal soul and has become an organizing principle for both his social and political life. Many religious groups are active in pursing a religious agenda in politics. Furthermore, religion is sometimes used by both religious leaders and politicians as a banner under which to garner support. Religion and religious actors have had, and continue to have, important implications for debates about policy fields ranging from gay rights to American foreign policy. P. Booke.
21106. Introduction to Feminist Political Theories. (=GNDR 21102) The course introduces feminist theories, with a special focus on their political significance. The aim is to familiarize students with the central concepts and arguments developed in the feminist literature, and to help them critically assess their force and originality. One of the main concepts discussed will be the concept of gender, with special attention to its critical force. Other themes and concepts discussed will be equality and difference, gender justice, the role of family, the public/private divide, motherhood, etc. We trace the historical development of feminist arguments on these topics, looking at how sometimes similar arguments have taken different shape in diverse historical contexts. M. Marin.
21400/32400. World Politics in the Nineteenth Century: A History. The course provides an overview of major developments in 19th century history: wars, revolutions, diplomacy, economic development, imperial expansion, and international trade and investment. The course covers key elements of international history needed for further study of international politics and IR theory. Besides diplomatic relations among the Great Powers, the course examines long-term trends in economic development and military force. Specific topics include the settlement after the Napoleonic Wars, the failed revolutions of 1848-49, European imperialism, the industrial revolution, and the origins of World War I. C. Lipson. (D)
22200. Introduction to Political Economy of Development. This course is an introduction to the political economy of development at the advanced undergraduate level. The key question of interest is: Why is life in some countries and regions "better" than in others? We will explore different approaches to this question using theories from economics and politics. Along the way, we will examine a selection of topics of substantive interest, including some of: Corruption, poverty, inequality and redistribution, health, the rule of law, and remittances. A. Simpser.
23900/53900. Thucydides. (=FNDL 29315, LLSO 27402, SCTH 31780) A reading of Thucydides' history, one of the classic guides to politics within and among political communities. Themes may include: progress and decline; justice, necessity, and expediency; strengths and weaknesses of democracies and oligarchies in domestic and foreign policy; stability, revolution, and civil war; strategy, statesmanship, and prudence; causes and effects of war and peace; imperialism, isolationism, and alliances; and piety, chance, and the limits of rationality. The first parts of Xenophon's Hellenica on the conclusion of the War will also be read. N. Tarcov. (A)
25200. Urban Politics. (=LLSO 26701) This course is designed to allow students to place research which tackles some of the basic urban problems that confront American society within the context of theories of urban politics. During the first part of the course we will critically review classic works in urban politics such as those of Dahl, Banfield, Peterson, and Castells. During the second part of the course we will shift to consider how the theory covered in the first part of the course can help us analyze and understand the implications for American democracy of selected severe urban problems. Problems selected for more detailed review this year include the Katrina disaster, and racial and ethnic urban conflict. M. Dawson.
27400/47400. Carl Schmitt and Political Theology. Enrollment limited to 20. This course is devoted to the political thought of controversial Weimar era lawyer and eventual National Socialist partisan, Carl Schmitt. Specifically, we will focus on Schmitt's claim that political authority requires extra-rational and transcendent foundations. Along with Schmitt's works from Weimar Germany, such as Political Theology and the Concept of the Political, we will read and discuss some of the related writings of two of his greatest interlocutors, Leo Strauss and Walter Benjamin. We will also consider recent appropriations of these theorists by authors such as Jakob Taubes, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Students are expected to come to the first session having read Political Theology in its entirety. J. McCormick. (A)
28000/38000. Organization, Ideology, and Political Change. (=LLSO 26601) This course centers on the comparative analysis of the emergence and institutionalization of public bureaucracies in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the former Soviet Union. The aim is to see whether there are distinctly different patterns of organizational rationality or whether bureaucracies are all culturally unique. B. Silberman. (C)
28700/38700. Jewish Political Thought. This course is an introductory survey of Jewish political thought from the Bible to the present day. Jews have had a unique political history: for the majority of Jewish history, Jews have not been a sovereign nation. As a result of this history of statelessness, Jewish thinkers have approached political questions in ways that differ from the mainstream of Western political theory. In this course, we will survey the different genres in which Jewish thinkers have addressed political questions, and we will explore what these thinkers have to say about power, authority, law, obligation, community, and national sovereignty. Readings will include selections from the Bible; Midrash; Halachah; medieval and modern philosophy (Maimonides, Spinoza); arguments for and against Zionism; and Israeli constitutional law. J. Cooper. (A)
29000/39800. Introduction to International Relations. This course introduces main themes in international relations that include the problems of war and peace, conflict and cooperation. We begin by considering some basic theoretical tools used to study international politics. We then focus on several prominent security issues in modern international relations, such as the cold war and post-cold war world, nuclear weapons, nationalism, and terrorism. We also deal with economic aspects of international relations, such as globalization, world trade, environmental pollution, and European unification. C. Lipson. (D)
30200. Political Economy of Public Policy. (=PBPL 30800) This course is designed to serve three interrelated goals. It is an introduction to core concepts in the study of political economy. These concepts include collective action, coordination, and commitment problems, externalities, principal-agent relationships, and so on. The course also introduces basic concepts in game theory, including Nash equilibrium, subgame Perfection, and repeated games. It is not, however, a suitable substitute for a game theory course for doctoral students in the social sciences. Finally, the course provides an overview of some of the key insights from the field of political economy on the foundations of the state and how institutions shape political behavior and political outcomes. E. Bueno de Mesquita.
30500. Introduction to Data Analysis. Open to Political Science Ph.D. students only. This course is an introduction to the research methods practiced by quantitative political scientists. The first part lays out the enterprise of empirical research: the structure and content of theories, the formulation of testable hypotheses, the logic of empirical tests, and the consideration of competing hypotheses. The second part considers the implementation of empirical research: the potential barriers to valid inferences, the strengths and limitations of research designs, and empirical representations of theoretical constructs. The final part provides hands-on experience with the two kinds of analyses most frequently performed by quantitative political researchers: contingency tables and regression. E. Oliver. (E)
33700. Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Conflict. A graduate-level introduction to some classic works on ethnicity, nationalism and ethnic conflict (e.g. Max Weber, Barth, Anderson, Eugen Weber, Horowitz, Lijphart), and also a survey of recent social science research on these topics. The course pays special attention to how we ought to test our theories about ethnic identities and especially the conditions under which salient ethnic and national identities might change and ethnic or nationalist violence might take place. Theoretical readings are drawn from all subfields of political science as well as from other social science disciplines, and the course draws on historical examples of ethnic mobilization and conflict from around the world. This course is most appropriate for graduate students but is open by permission to undergraduates with significant exposure to political science courses, or the study of ethnicity. S. Wilkinson. (C)
35000. Race and Politics I. Fundamentally, this course is meant to explore how race, both historically and currently, influences politics in the United States. For example, is there something unique about the politics of African Americans? Does the idea and lived experience of whiteness shape one's political behavior? Throughout the quarter, students interrogate the way scholars, primarily in the field of American politics, have ignored, conceptualized, measured, modeled, and sometimes fully engaged the concept of race. We examine the multiple manifestations of race in the political domain, both as it functions alone and as it intersects with other identities such as gender, class, and sexuality. M. Dawson. (B)
40700. The Modern Self: Autobiography in Modern Political Theory. In this seminar, we will read autobiographies written by early modern and modern political theorists, and ask what the vogue for autobiography reveals about modern conceptions of the self. Why do modern theorists assume that individuals have the desire, and the ability, to make themselves legible through autobiographical narration? How does the autobiographical aspiration to "nakedness" reflect philosophical concerns surrounding truth, appearance, and authenticity, as well as political concerns surrounding celebrity and vanity (not to mention theological concerns surrounding pride)? We will examine these and related questions in texts by Montaigne, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, J.S. Mill, and Nietzsche. We will also devote time to contemporary theories of autobiography, confession, and self-articulation. J. Cooper. (A)
43100. Maximum Likelihood. The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the estimation and interpretation of maximum likelihood, a statistical method which permits a close linkage of deductive theory and empirical estimation. Among the problems considered in this course include: models of dichotomous choice, such as turnout and vote choice; models of limited categorical data, such as those for multi-party elections and survey responses; models for counts of uncorrelated events, such as executive orders and bookburnings; models for duration, such as the length of parliamentary coalitions or the tenure of bureaucracies; models for compositional data, such as allocation of time by bureaucrats to task and district vote shares; and models for latent variables, such as for predispositions. The emphasis in this course will be on the extraction of information about political and social phenomena, not upon properties of estimators. J. Brehm. (E)
44600. Political Economy of Development. This course is an introduction to recent scholarship on the political economy of development. The course will focus on three questions: What is development? What causes or constrains development? How do we know? The course is structured as follows. In the first part, will review economic theories of development and examine different approaches to the definition of development. In the second part, we will examine different theories about the causes of development, with emphasis on the way in which political and economic processes constrain or reinforce each other. In the third part, we will apply the knowledge from the first two parts to different topics of substantive interest, including health policy, corruption, poverty, inequality and redistribution, and the rule of law, among others. Throughout, we will emphasize issues of inference, exploring the relative merits of different empirical methodologies. A. Simpser. (C)
46410. Co-evolution of States and Markets. This course will focus on the emergence of alternative forms of organization control (e.g., centralized bureaucracy, multiple hierarchies, elite networks, and clientage) in different social structural contexts (e.g., the interaction of kinship, class, nation states, markets and heterodox mobilization). Themes will be illustrated in numerous cross-cultural contexts. J. Padgett. (C)
50600. Japanese Political Institutions. B. Silberman. (C)
51200. Law-Philosophy Seminar. PQ: Students are admitted by permission of the instructors. They should submit a c.v. and a statement (reasons for interest in the course, relevant background in law and/or philosophy) by September 20 to Nussbaum and Anderson by e mail. Usual participants include graduate students in philosophy, political science, and divinity, and law students. This is a seminar/workshop most of whose participants are faculty from various area institutions. It admits approximately ten students by permission of the instructors. Its aim is to study, each year, a topic that arises in both philosophy and the law and to ask how bringing the two fields together may yield mutual illumination. There are twelve meetings throughout the year, always on Mondays from 4 to 6 PM. Half of the sessions are led by local faculty, half by visiting speakers. The leader assigns readings for the session (which may be by that person, by other contemporaries, or by major historical figures), and the session consists of a brief introduction by the leader, followed by structured questioning by the two faculty coordinators, followed by general discussion. Students write a 20-25 page seminar paper at the end of the year. The course satisfies the Law School Writing Requirement. The schedule of meetings will be announced by mid-September, and prospective students should submit their credentials to both instructors by September 20. Past themes have included: practical reason; equality; privacy; autonomy; global justice; pluralism and toleration; war; sexuality and family. The theme for 2006-7 will be Coercion. People whom we are planning to invite include Catharine MacKinnon, Stephen Schulhofer, Cass Sunstein, Bernard Harcourt, Marcia Baron, and Alan Wertheimer. M. Nussbaum, S. Anderson. (A)
53200. Education and Moral Psychology. Enrollment limited to 25. Permission of the instructor required, and this should be sought in writing (e mail) by September 20. A minimum prerequisite is an undergraduate major in philosophy or the equivalent course work in philosophy. This seminar will study some classic works in the philosophy of education, asking what account of children they articulate and how their educational proposals are connected both to psychological analysis and to normative ethical and political ideas. Included will be philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, the Greek and Roman Stoics, Rousseau, Kant, J. S. Mill, Dewey, and Rabindranath Tagore, but also thinkers about childhood and education who were not professional philosophers, such as Friedrich Froebel, Johann Pestalozzi, Maria Montessori, and Donald Winnicott. We will ask about how education is related to important goals of the personal life, such as happiness and autonomy, but also how it is related to important goals of a shared political life, such as mutual respect and compassionate attention to human need. M. Nussbaum. (A)
53500. Democratic Accountability. Enrollment limited to 15. To what extent should public officials in a democracy be kept responsive and accountable to citizens? What are the best means available for democratic citizens to ensure the public accountability of elites? Should wealthy private citizens be included in the definition of the elites who are constrained by laws and institutions within a democracy? These are some of the questions we will pursue in this graduate seminar. After some consideration of political accountability in pre-18th century republics, most of the course will be devoted to the recent literature on accountability in contemporary democracies, especially the United States. J. McCormick. (C)
