Teaching is a crucial part of any academic's job. I enjoy the classroom and have worked hard to develop a portfolio of courses that spans political philosophy, intellectual history, and contemporary political and international history.
I am currently developing an introductory lecture course on the history of the global state system since the mid-19th century. In future, I also will be reprising a course on the history of European integration.
In the meantime, my teaching specialities are as follows:
Fall Semester 2018
Intellectuals and Politics: This course’s subject matter has become more diverse and is no longer restricted to intellectuals from Eastern and Western Europe. Thinkers from China, Nigeria, Palestine, the United States, Singapore, and Australia have been added to the Europeans studied in the course’s earlier manifestations.
The course deals with the role of the intellectual in world politics. It argues that the intellectual is a moral gadfly: a voice of conscience that exposes the contradictions, hypocrisies, compromises and injustices of the social order. Intellectuals tell uncomfortable truths, although they do so in varying ways and use different means to their end. This is why the course contains different kinds of intellectual production: novels, memoirs, manifestoes, propaganda, and philosophical essays are all represented here.
The first part of this course focusses upon how leading intellectuals of twentieth century Europe responded to fascist and communist totalitarianism. Some celebrated totalitarianism, others idealized it, still others fought against it. Some idealized one form of totalitarianism, but fought against another. Few intellectuals of stature ignored it. The Holocaust, the Great Purges, the Fascist Ventennio, the radical utilitarianism of Stalinist dogma, and the democratic West’s own doubts and hesitations are all subjects that have been analysed in this section of the course.
One cannot understand the world today unless one understands that the question of racial identity, the fight against colonialism, and the broader struggle against religious and cultural orthodoxy have been central to political life. These issues shaped the experience of twentieth-century intellectuals and are reflected and refracted in some of the most important texts written during the last century. The second part of the class, therefore, is devoted to the study and discussion of these topics.
The final part of the course deals with some of the great issues that have emerged since the end of the Cold War: conflicting understandings of human rights, cosmopolitanism and the ethics of globalization, neoconservatism. The course concludes with a lesson dedicated to the core ideas of Isaiah Berlin.
Intellectuals who have been studied in this course include: Chinua Achebe, Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, James Baldwin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, Francis Fukuyama, Giovanni Gentile, Vaclav Havel, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Ayann Hirsi Ali, Tony Judt, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, Milan Kundera, Primo Levi, Kishore Mahbubani, F.T. Marinetti, George Orwell, Edward Said, Jean-Paul Sartre, Leonardo Sciascia, Ignazio Silone, Peter Singer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The course is not recommended for students who are averse to reading.
Instability and Change in Consolidated Democracies (Taught with Prof. Justin O. Frosini): This course uses two case studies from contemporary British history to examine the causes of political change in consolidated democracies. The cases it looks at in detail are:
• The Rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979
• Brexit and its aftermath, 2016─7
Why these two cases? Britain was a by-word for political stability in the 1950s. Yet by the mid–1970s it was regarded as the ‘sick man of Europe.’ The Heath government fought the 1974 elections on the theme of ‘who governs Britain’ (the voters decided it was not the government); Britain was forced to have recourse to the IMF in 1976; Mrs. Thatcher was elected to office in May 1979 with a specific mandate to stop the decline. The country, in short, had gone from being a paragon of stability to a pioneer of radical political change in the space of a decade, or little more.
Brexit is a second case in point. Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, Britain was regarded as one of Europe’s most prosperous and forward-looking democracies – ‘cool Britannia’. It proceeded to avoid financial catastrophe by a hair’s breadth in 2009; to risk the dissolution of the union as a result of Scottish independence and, in 2016, to vote by 52 – 48 percent to leave the European Union (EU). Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of this decision, once again Britain and the British people had embarked upon sudden radical political change.
The thesis of this course is that by looking at these two empirical cases one can develop a tentative method for the political analysis of advanced democracies. We are going to ask ‘why did Britain become politically unstable in the 1970s, and again in 2016?’ These questions cannot be reduced to a few simple variables in a rigid formula. It can only be answered by reconstructing (simulating) the events and trying to figure out what was important and what was not. Our point is, however, that it is possible to generalize from these experiences to other cases. Analysts should look at the constitutional frameworks, the expected and unexpected consequences of legislation, the moods of public opinion, the solidity of the public finances, the perception of social justice, the personal qualities of political leaders, the ambitions and self-image of the political class, the changing character of the population and so on. We should, in short, multiply variables, not reduce them, if we want to understand the direction that particular societies are taking. If we want to gauge political risk – and gauge is a much better word than calculate since it implies using judgment rather than some mechanical formula – there is no alternative to simulating complexity.
Other courses taught since 2012
Europe's Long Peace:
Peace and War:
The End of European Imperialism: