3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course explores how modern civilization has been placed “on trial” by its most penetrating critics and provocative prophets. Beginning with Marx’s radical indictment of capitalism, students will examine how thinkers such as Max Weber, Friedrich Hayek, Jacques Ellul, and Jürgen Habermas interrogated the ideological foundations, structural dynamics, and ambiguous ethical consequences of modern social systems. The course highlights the dialogue among these figures, inviting students to synthesize their theories into a dialectical portrait of modern humanity’s existential predicament. In reconstructing this grand discourse, we will analyze the powers, promises, and pathologies of capitalism, socialism, and democracy, and relate our findings to historical cases. Ultimately, students will be challenged to reflect critically and imaginatively on how our political-economic systems function—and whether they can, and ought to, be organized differently.