POLITICAL STUDIES

CRN	90338	Distribution	C
Course No.	PS 105
Title	Introduction to Comparative Government
Professor	Jonathan Becker
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 pm OLIN 202

This course is an introduction to the study of comparative government. Political systems of selected foreign societies are examined in order to illustrate major types, including democratic and authoritarian, mature and developing, 'Western' and non-'Western'. The course examines patterns of similarity and differences in the ways that political life and governmental action are structured, including formal institutions of government, such as parliaments and bureaucracies; political parties and other forms of group life; and political beliefs, values, and ideologies. Case studies will include the United Kingdom, Russia, Brazil and Zimbabwe.

CRN	90329	Distribution	C
Course No.	PS 113
Title	Chasing Progress
Professor	Sanjib Baruah
Schedule	Wed Fr 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 203

The study of economic development of the Third World has gone through several intellectual phases. The first generation of scholars viewed the process somewhat optimistically as the global extension of modernity or capitalism. Neo-Marxist critics tried to locate Third World underdevelopment in the history of colonialism and in the persistence of structures of dependency of Third World countries. There is now a tendency to get away from general theories of development or underdevelopment and to distinguish among various paths to progress. The scholarly uncertainties reflect dilemmas facing development planners. Although development has produced many gains, it does not automatically improve people's conditions, and sometimes segments of the poor even lose their traditional entitlements during the process of development. Yet no one has made a persuasive case for ameliorating poverty and hunger without development. The course will introduce students to problems of Third World development and to debates on development among scholars and development planners.

CRN	90326	Distribution	C
Course No.	PS 122
Title	Institutions, Processes and Politics in American Government
Professor	Joseph Luders
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm -2:50 pm OLIN 205

This course introduces students to the basic institutions and processes of American government. The class is meant to provide students with a grasp of the fundamental dynamics of American politics and the skills to be an effective participant in and critic of the political process. During the semester, we will take apart how the government works, make sense of current political questions, and learn about how to influence the government at various levels.

CRN	90327	Distribution	C
Course No.	PS 232
Title	Social Movements and Political Change: Labor, Race and Gender in America
Professor	Joseph Luders
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 pm -2:50 pm OLIN 205

Cross-listed: American Studies, Gender Studies, Historical Studies

Related Interest: AADS

This course considers three general questions: What accounts for the emergence of social movements? What explains their development and decline over time? And, finally, why have some movements succeeded in shaping American politics while others have failed? Looking at the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement, we will investigate the conditions for successfully affecting the American politics and policy. Particular attention is paid to movement tactics and the changing structure of political coalitions.

CRN	90333	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	PS 234
Title	Western Political Theory: Bourgeois and/or Citizen
Professor	David Kettler
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 pm -4:20 pm OLIN 307

While modern political theories define the central questions of human collective experience in terms of relations between individuals and public power, social theories decenter the state, theoretically transforming the relations generally labeled political into elements in a larger contexture of interpersonal interactions, civil society. This course compares contrasting approaches to the problem of relating the social and political identities of human beings subject to political order. First posed as a question about pre-political property rights and legal authority, the issue is rendered more complex when relations among proprietors are reinterpreted as a function of social arrangements - mentalities, class relations, forms of work - that undergo significant change in historical time. Modern political theorists pursue various strategies in their attempts to comprehend these findings within the theory of the modern state. Although the sequence of authors covered is chronological, the aim of the course is comparative. Principal authors are John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel.

CRN	90331	Distribution	C
Course No.	PS 249
Title	Dreams of Perfectibility: The Quest for a Moral Foreign Policy from Jefferson to Wilson, Part I
Professor	James Chace
Schedule	Mon Tu 1:30 pm -2:50 pm LC 206

From the earliest days of the Republic, America's intense drive for absolute security has shaped our history and national character. Americans have, of course, gone to war for a variety of specific reasons--to expand their territory for economic gain, in response to affronts to their national honor and territorial integrity, to secure their nation's role as the guardian of freedom and the promoter of democratic values. Moreover, the overarching response to America's need to counter real or imagined foreign threats has been the use of unilateral action as the surest method of achieving national security. But American foreign policy has always been justified by appeals to American exceptionalism. America as an exemplar or as a crusader--these are the moral poles of U.S. foreign policy. Yet no American foreign policy can be successful in the long term without a moral component. Should America have a democratizing mission? What are the consequences of this search for perfectionism in an imperfect world?

CRN	90343	Distribution	C
Course No.	PS 322
Title	The American Age: U. S. Power & Purpose in the Twenty-First Century
Professor	James Chace
Schedule	Wed 10:00 am - 12:20 pm ASP 302

PIE Core Course

With the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe in 1989, the bipolar world that endured for almost five decades came to an end. This has produced an unexpected result in the international order: the end of superpower rivalry. The United States is thus deprived of a role that provided it with its national mission throughout the years of the Cold War. At the same time, its allies and antagonists seek to curb the hegemonic ambitions of the new American imperium. Isolated, resented and envied, the United States finds itself compelled to reconsider not only what it must do, but, in a significant respect, what it is and what it stands for. There is a new global agenda for America, whose power and predominance has never been greater, in which the search for invulnerability takes place in a world torn by disorder and conflict. This new American agenda will be debated and defined by a group of upper-level students.

CRN	90328	Distribution	C
Course No.	PS 340
Title	Equality in American Political Development
Professor	Joseph Luders
Schedule	Tu 4:00 pm -6:20 pm OLIN 307

Cross-listed: American Studies, Historical Studies

At the beginning of a new century, America's commitment to equality appears to be under attack. From assaults upon welfare and affirmative action to the abandonment of racial integration in the public schools, governmental actions to promote equality are in retreat. Using an historical perspective, this course explores the current deterioration of egalitarian policies. This analysis begins with a question: Under what circumstances does the American government act to reduce class, gender, and racial inequalities? We approach this question in two ways. First, we investigate the factors that have prompted the government to promote equality. Close attention will be paid to the effects of social movements, economic crises, and war mobilization. Second, we consider the obstacles that have hindered or blocked efforts to expand equality including cultural values, racial and ethnic cleavages within the working class, business intransigence, and repression. Looking at the political dynamics that have contributed to the expansion and contraction of egalitarian initiatives in the past, the course concludes with an analysis of contemporary politics and an attempt at forecasting the direction of equality politics in the future.

CRN	90414	Distribution	C
Course No.	PS 391
Title	Civil Society
Professor	Sanjib Baruah
Schedule	Th 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 308

PIE Core Course

One of the legacies of the Eastern and Central European revolutions of the 1980s is the popularization of the term civil society. The new usage is different from the sense in which the term was used in its classical form by Hegel, by thinkers of the Scottish enlightenment -- Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and David Hume - or by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. The seminar will examine the career of the concept of civil society as a vantage point from which we'll look at changing notions of governance, especially with regard to modern society's perennial difficulty with organizing obligations to strangers. The readings will include classical texts by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Alexis de Tocqueville, essays by Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel focused on Poland and Czechoslovakia under communism, texts about the US by Robert Putnam and Alan Wolfe, critical theoretical essays by Michael Hardt, Michael Shapiro, and Charles Taylor and debates on the relevance of the concept to other areas such as the Indian subcontinent and Africa: essays by Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakravarty, Ranajit Guha, and Mehmood Mamdani. Open only to upper college students.