Introduction
to Political Thinking

This course provides an introduction to the history of western political thought, and more broadly, to a particular history of what it means to think politically—about the nature of our collective lives, about the rights and obligations of rule, about the limits of political power, about the virtues and vices that define the practices of citizenship and leadership, and about the forms of violence, domination, and exclusion that have often underwritten political communities of all kinds. Political philosophers stretching back to the ancient world have examined and debated what it means to study politics—the kind of knowledge proper to politics—as well as the kinds of values, political regimes, institutional forms, laws, and economic systems that best facilitate “the good life” for human beings.   

Political thinkers did not ask these questions in a vacuum, or disconnected from the political contexts in which they lived. Indeed, the history of political thinking is a history of thinking with and through crises, generated by conditions of tyranny, war, upheaval, conquest, and domination. Now, as we live through crises of our own—a global pandemic, ecological crisis, and the delegitimization of democracy to name but a few—the project of thinking politically in times of upheaval is one we share with thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to WEB Du Bois, Simone de Beauvoir, and contemporary philosophers like Charles Mills.    

In this course, we will look carefully and closely at the furious debates that have engaged thinkers of western political thought, ancient and modern, over the terrain of politics in crisis. We will consider this history of political thinking oriented around three sets of questions:   

• questions of order: Who should rule, and on what basis? What is the nature of political power? Is there a "natural" order to human community? Are there good reasons that some should rule and others should be ruled? What is the best order?  

• questions of authority: What does it mean to live in peace and security? How is this security guaranteed and who has the authority to secure it? How is political power authorized? Can citizens be substantively free, equal, and governed at the same time?   

• questions of freedom: Are political orders all based on some form of domination? How has freedom for some been linked to practices of enslavement, colonization, exploitation, and unfreedom for others? What would liberation from these structures mean and look like?