Power

Catalog description

This course explores the nature, origins, justifications, and effects of political power from antiquity to today. The course is divided into four chronological sections. The first surveys ancient Greece, examining both the power of the demos within democratic city-states and the balance of power among combatant empires in the context of the Peloponnesian War. The second turns to early modern Europe, focusing on the ways in which power, coercion, and violence are integral to both utopian and realist visions of political life. The course’s third unit focuses on modernity, taking up questions of how political power comes to be an artifact of capitalist economic production and how it produces moral frameworks. Finally, the course looks to substantive examples of political theorists confronting problems of power in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in connection with race, the rise of the bureaucratic state, and biopower.