First Year Seminar: Poverty and Class Politics: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Catalog description

Although a central concern for many canonical figures of Western political thought–including Aristotle, Montesquieu, Mandeville, Locke, and Rousseau–the causes of poverty and purported characteristics of “the poor” are often sidelined in discussions of the Western political theoretical tradition. In this seminar, we read canonical and non-canonical works on poverty as a lens to understand state formation, popular discontent and resistance, democracy, class collaboration and conflict, colonial expansion, and (neo)colonial development. These works will cover the ancient and medieval periods but focus on the modern era. Finally, we also approach poverty in the history of political thought through its twentieth-century reception and will consider how this tradition informs contemporary discourse about poverty and the poor.