3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This is a graduate seminar on the interpretive and critical problems that arise when political theorists read and write about texts from long, long ago or far, far away. The first part of the course will consider approaches to the history of European political thought influenced by Marx, Foucault, Strauss, Skinner, and Arendt, amongst others. Readings will include both major methodological statements and examples of interpretive and critical scholarship undertaken by proponents of these different schools of thought. In the second part of the course, we will ask whether and how methods developed to analyze and learn from the history of political thought can be applied to the study of political thinkers who lived and wrote outside western Europe and North America. Major questions for consideration in both parts of the course include: Can old ideas help us solve problems arising in contemporary politics and political theory? What can we learn from intellectual traditions unconnected to our own? What do we have to do in order to understand the ideas contained within a given text? Do we have to understand a text for it to be useful to us?