Political and Social Theory
Being a good person means being a good citizen, right? And what is a good citizen except for someone who has strong political commitments based in matters of fact and value? Or so goes the rationale of our common sense today. Whether this is true or not, it is undeniably worthwhile that we examine these presuppositions, as well as the main ideas that inform political theory. Such a goal goes far beyond the bounds of a single course. What you see below are the different courses in broad outline.
Introduction to Political Philosophy
Introductory lectures and discussions on the essential works from the history of Western political philosophy. By the time you complete this course you should be able to say you have been introduced to the basic questions, insights, and concepts of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Paine, Hamilton, Madison, Marx, Schmidt, Rawls, Trotsky, Arendt, Hayak, Derrida, Agamben, and Dugin. You will have a basic idea for what that thinker’s role in the history of political philosophy is, and more importantly, you will have begun to think with the essential concepts necessary for thinking the political.
Introduction to Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Theory
Introductory lectures and discussions on the essential works from the history of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social theory. By the time you complete this course you should be able to say you have been introduced to the basic questions, insights, and concepts of Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, Margaret Mead, Habermas, Claud Levi Straus, Theodor Adorno, Fernand Braudel, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour, Lloyd deMause, and James Scott. We will not be comprehensively reading all of these thinkers, but you will engage with fragments of their primary works firsthand, to at least get a taste of the richness that these thinkers all bring to social theory.
Critique of Political Economy
Introductory lectures and discussions on the essential works from critique of political economy. By the time you complete this course you should be able to say you have surveyed the essential works in this field, with several weeks spent on Marx’s master work Das Kapital, as well as crucial “expansion packs” by Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding, and Henryk Grossman, including sympathetic yet critical reinterpretations by Moishe Postone, Paul Mattick, and Michael Heinrich.
The Old Left – Unions, Anarchists, and Marxism
Introductory lectures and discussions on the essential works from critique of political economy. By the time you complete this course you should be able to say you have surveyed essential works from the history of union organizing, anarchism, and Marxism. This should give you a good enough basis from which to then choose which directions to dive deeper in the future. Readings, lectures, and discussions will revolve around the works of Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Proudhon, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin!
Against Worldview Marxism and Leninist Variants
Introductory lectures and discussions on crucial texts from the history of critiquing “worldview Marxism,” especially from Lenin onwards. By the time you complete this course you should be able to say you have surveyed essential works from self-critical Marxists such as Paul Mattick, Fredrick F. Bender, and Michael Heinrich,, ex-Marxists like Leszek Kolakowski, as well as famous “outsider” critiques of Marxism from the likes of Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper. You should be able to say what their core issues with Marxism are, so that when you go back to the essential works by Marx you can decide for yourself how damning these critiques really are.
The New Left – Diversity and Oppression
The New Left rises in the 1960s after decades of Marxist categories, contradictions, and struggles proved insufficient to the crises of the moment. Or at least, that’s how the New Left understood itself. These introductory lectures and discussions focus on the primary works key New Left thinkers such as Zinn, Fanon, Marcuse, Mills, Newton, Dunayevskaya, as well as critics of the New Left like Lasch and Ehrenreich who were nonetheless a part of its development.
PMC, or the Professionals and Managers of Capital
This course focuses on the key works that theorize the professional managerial class, or professional managers of capital. By the time you have done these readings and lectures, you will understand the core arguments and directions of this theory, which is essential for theorizing capital and power in the 21st Century. Then you will be a member of the related forum, where the conversation goes on.
This course can be accessed here.
Bourgeois Freedom vs. Totalitarianism
This course aims to understand classical liberalism and political economy, as well as modern recapitulations of liberalism. We assume that there are insights, concerns, and problems seen by bourgeois theorists that get lost on those who never took them seriously. The lectures and discussions will revolve around essential works by John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, as well as more modern liberal thinkers like Rawls, Hayak, and, though this is controversial, Arendt –because we take for granted the idea that IF a thinker focuses on the problems of tyranny and totalitarianism, then they are some kind of liberal. The assumption that guides this course is that those are worthwhile concerns and that throwing out such concerns as merely bourgeois undermines any hope for sublation.
