Modern Political Thought (mixed undergraduate & graduate lecture course)
This course attends to a distinctive cluster of political and philosophical concerns that have preoccupied ‘modern’ thinkers from Machiavelli to Mill, including: What grounds obedience to the laws and justifies the coercive power of the state? Can individual liberty be reconciled with the power of the collective? What kind of inequalities among human beings are permissible? Must the citizens of a well-ordered polity be virtuous, or do cleverly designed institutions obviate the need for that? Is there a common good? Does history chart a foreseeable course, and how far do human beings control the social forces that govern them? In addition, the class examines different political thinkers’ accounts of the rise of the sovereign state, the decline of hereditary privilege, the challenges of cultural, racial, and religious pluralism, European hegemony and colonial exploitation, the revival of popular government after centuries of disuse, and the growing importance of market exchange.
Ethics of International Relations (senior seminar)
Is international relations purely a realm of raw power? If ethical ‘ought’s are out of place in politics among states, why do leaders and citizens persistently appeal to them? Is it possible to speak of moral obligation in the absence of a central enforcer? In contrast to much of mainstream international relations scholarship, this course allow students to explore the space for normativity in international politics. It also provides them a number of perspectives through which to evaluate normative claims about international politics and equip students to craft systematic normative arguments of their own. The first module trains students to unearth and critically examine the normative presuppositions built into the standard paradigms, including the perspectives and commitments that they privilege. In the second part of the course, students develop a sophisticated understanding of the enigmatic ‘building block’ of modern international politics, namely the sovereign state, examining its purported capacity for agency, the varied incarnations of the state form (imperial, national, postcolonial), and the structures that have been devised to constrain state sovereignty (most notably international law and the contemporary human rights regime). The third and final part of the course addresses two major substantive ethical themes of international politics, namely global distributive justice and the ethics of armed conflict. In this way, the course address the ethics of international relations both as a discipline and as an object of study.
Persons, states, corporations (graduate colloquium)
Most political scientists are committed to some form of methodological individualism, namely the idea that “nothing but individual opportunities, beliefs, and motivations can enter into the explanation of… behavior.” (Elster 1985: 137) And yet, the idea that various sorts of collectives like states, nations, firms, universities, or political parties display a unitary identity and exercise autonomous agency comparable is pervasive in political science scholarship and everyday discourse. Are there analytically cogent reasons for treating groups, states, and other organizations as agents capable of intention and will, as having cognitive and emotional states? Or is this evidence of intellectual laziness or (gasp!) reliance on tacit metaphysical premises? When we talk about states as displaying fear and distrust, ascribe responsibility to nations for injustices committed generations ago, declaim the self-determination rights of colonized peoples, or hold corporations accountable for crimes, do we assume that these collectives are superorganisms with minds of their own, or do we simply engage in metaphorical (“as if”) thinking? Which attributes must collectives possess in order to be treated as subjects: intentionality, personhood, agency, rationality, moral status...? Do these attributes justify ascribing certain rights and duties to them? Are collectives more than the sum of their members or reducible to them? Are state and individual the only analytical and normative templates available to political theory? This graduate colloquium in political theory trains students to craft systematic answers to these questions. Course material is drawn from a range of cognate disciplines including political science, law, philosophy, and business ethics. Students get an opportunity to think rigorously about the conceptual foundations of group agency and debate competing ways to account for the descriptive and moral salience we assign to collectives. The class pays special attention to the capacity of collectives, organizations, states, and other non-human subjects to bear rights and duties. Students debate whether such purported group rights as rights to collective self-determination, culture, territory, and a healthy environment are compatible with viewing human beings as the exclusive units of moral concern.
Citizenship & Exclusion (undergraduate lecture course or senior seminar)
Citizenship has always been a battleground in struggles for inclusion and exclusion. This course aims to familiarize students with contemporary theories of citizenship from the lens of boundaries. What kind of ‘good’ is citizenship, and why is it denied to some? How do politically, socially, or culturally marginalized groups use the discourse of citizenship to claim equal participation and recognition? How should access to citizenship be regulated in contemporary democracies? Is it possible to imagine citizenship without exclusion? As citizenship is inseparable from political practice, the assigned reading is drawn from a wide range of materials: philosophical and normative accounts, historical studies, social science research, judicial decisions, manifestoes, and speeches.
Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West (Columbia College Core Curriculum 2-semester sequence)
What is the good life for human beings? How can we adjudicate among the competing demands of moral, political, scientific, or religious viewpoints? On what grounds do social and political institutions claim our allegiance? What role do virtue and moral character have to play in society? Can individual liberty be reconciled with power? What, for that matter, is individual liberty? Can we find a scientifically validated way of ordering society, or do such attempts constrict the scope of human freedom and agency? As the central pillar of Columbia’s famed Core Curriculum, Contemporary Civilization addresses these enduring questions through the prism of some of the most influential texts of Western thought from Plato to Nietzsche, and pays particular attention to how each of these works builds on, amends, or rejects the wisdom of its predecessors.
Click here for the Contemporary Civilization website.
International Political Theory (graduate colloquium)
This graduate seminar in political theory reviews a series of themes that are foundational to contemporary normative debates about international and transnational politics. Taking seriously the proposition that public power is no longer exercised exclusively at the level of the nation-state, the seminar surveys a number of critical perspectives on the legitimacy of contemporary institutions of governance beyond the state. The course is organized into seven major themes, including sovereignty, imperialism, commerce, cosmopolitanism, justice, human rights, and democracy.
Commerce & Civic Virtue (graduate colloquium)
This graduate colloquium in political theory examines 18th century philosophies of commerce, civic virtue, and freedom. The course is centered on primary texts, including the works of Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, David Hume, Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson, and Immanuel Kant. Of particular interest is these thinkers’ respective treatments of the moral and behavioral foundations of market society, the relationship between wealth and political equality, the effects of commerce and luxury on social mores and personal morals, and, perhaps most importantly, the domestic and international consequences of economic exchange. The selected reading highlights the gradual dismantlement of the classical republican aversion to wealth accumulation, and the rehabilitation of avarice into an integrative (even edifying) social force.
Normative & Empirical Perspectives on International Law (graduate colloquium co-taught with Dr. Tonya Putnam)
This graduate colloquium aims to give students from different subfields of political science a rigorous cross-disciplinary foundation in key themes that cut across international relations, international law, and political theory. The themes covered by the seminar include territory, sovereignty, interstate cooperation & anarchy, the use of force, and human rights. Students will focus on conceptual, normative, and empirical articulations of each theme with an eye to the ways in which the insights from each disciplinary perspective reverberate in the development of international legal norms. The course also attends to how normative perspectives inform empirical work, and whether and how particular empirical presumptions underwrite normative perspectives. Course materials are drawn from classical texts in political philosophy, contemporary empirical scholarship, and legal documents.
This course attends to a distinctive cluster of political and philosophical concerns that have preoccupied ‘modern’ thinkers from Machiavelli to Mill, including: What grounds obedience to the laws and justifies the coercive power of the state? Can individual liberty be reconciled with the power of the collective? What kind of inequalities among human beings are permissible? Must the citizens of a well-ordered polity be virtuous, or do cleverly designed institutions obviate the need for that? Is there a common good? Does history chart a foreseeable course, and how far do human beings control the social forces that govern them? In addition, the class examines different political thinkers’ accounts of the rise of the sovereign state, the decline of hereditary privilege, the challenges of cultural, racial, and religious pluralism, European hegemony and colonial exploitation, the revival of popular government after centuries of disuse, and the growing importance of market exchange.
Ethics of International Relations (senior seminar)
Is international relations purely a realm of raw power? If ethical ‘ought’s are out of place in politics among states, why do leaders and citizens persistently appeal to them? Is it possible to speak of moral obligation in the absence of a central enforcer? In contrast to much of mainstream international relations scholarship, this course allow students to explore the space for normativity in international politics. It also provides them a number of perspectives through which to evaluate normative claims about international politics and equip students to craft systematic normative arguments of their own. The first module trains students to unearth and critically examine the normative presuppositions built into the standard paradigms, including the perspectives and commitments that they privilege. In the second part of the course, students develop a sophisticated understanding of the enigmatic ‘building block’ of modern international politics, namely the sovereign state, examining its purported capacity for agency, the varied incarnations of the state form (imperial, national, postcolonial), and the structures that have been devised to constrain state sovereignty (most notably international law and the contemporary human rights regime). The third and final part of the course addresses two major substantive ethical themes of international politics, namely global distributive justice and the ethics of armed conflict. In this way, the course address the ethics of international relations both as a discipline and as an object of study.
Persons, states, corporations (graduate colloquium)
Most political scientists are committed to some form of methodological individualism, namely the idea that “nothing but individual opportunities, beliefs, and motivations can enter into the explanation of… behavior.” (Elster 1985: 137) And yet, the idea that various sorts of collectives like states, nations, firms, universities, or political parties display a unitary identity and exercise autonomous agency comparable is pervasive in political science scholarship and everyday discourse. Are there analytically cogent reasons for treating groups, states, and other organizations as agents capable of intention and will, as having cognitive and emotional states? Or is this evidence of intellectual laziness or (gasp!) reliance on tacit metaphysical premises? When we talk about states as displaying fear and distrust, ascribe responsibility to nations for injustices committed generations ago, declaim the self-determination rights of colonized peoples, or hold corporations accountable for crimes, do we assume that these collectives are superorganisms with minds of their own, or do we simply engage in metaphorical (“as if”) thinking? Which attributes must collectives possess in order to be treated as subjects: intentionality, personhood, agency, rationality, moral status...? Do these attributes justify ascribing certain rights and duties to them? Are collectives more than the sum of their members or reducible to them? Are state and individual the only analytical and normative templates available to political theory? This graduate colloquium in political theory trains students to craft systematic answers to these questions. Course material is drawn from a range of cognate disciplines including political science, law, philosophy, and business ethics. Students get an opportunity to think rigorously about the conceptual foundations of group agency and debate competing ways to account for the descriptive and moral salience we assign to collectives. The class pays special attention to the capacity of collectives, organizations, states, and other non-human subjects to bear rights and duties. Students debate whether such purported group rights as rights to collective self-determination, culture, territory, and a healthy environment are compatible with viewing human beings as the exclusive units of moral concern.
Citizenship & Exclusion (undergraduate lecture course or senior seminar)
Citizenship has always been a battleground in struggles for inclusion and exclusion. This course aims to familiarize students with contemporary theories of citizenship from the lens of boundaries. What kind of ‘good’ is citizenship, and why is it denied to some? How do politically, socially, or culturally marginalized groups use the discourse of citizenship to claim equal participation and recognition? How should access to citizenship be regulated in contemporary democracies? Is it possible to imagine citizenship without exclusion? As citizenship is inseparable from political practice, the assigned reading is drawn from a wide range of materials: philosophical and normative accounts, historical studies, social science research, judicial decisions, manifestoes, and speeches.
Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West (Columbia College Core Curriculum 2-semester sequence)
What is the good life for human beings? How can we adjudicate among the competing demands of moral, political, scientific, or religious viewpoints? On what grounds do social and political institutions claim our allegiance? What role do virtue and moral character have to play in society? Can individual liberty be reconciled with power? What, for that matter, is individual liberty? Can we find a scientifically validated way of ordering society, or do such attempts constrict the scope of human freedom and agency? As the central pillar of Columbia’s famed Core Curriculum, Contemporary Civilization addresses these enduring questions through the prism of some of the most influential texts of Western thought from Plato to Nietzsche, and pays particular attention to how each of these works builds on, amends, or rejects the wisdom of its predecessors.
Click here for the Contemporary Civilization website.
International Political Theory (graduate colloquium)
This graduate seminar in political theory reviews a series of themes that are foundational to contemporary normative debates about international and transnational politics. Taking seriously the proposition that public power is no longer exercised exclusively at the level of the nation-state, the seminar surveys a number of critical perspectives on the legitimacy of contemporary institutions of governance beyond the state. The course is organized into seven major themes, including sovereignty, imperialism, commerce, cosmopolitanism, justice, human rights, and democracy.
Commerce & Civic Virtue (graduate colloquium)
This graduate colloquium in political theory examines 18th century philosophies of commerce, civic virtue, and freedom. The course is centered on primary texts, including the works of Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, David Hume, Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson, and Immanuel Kant. Of particular interest is these thinkers’ respective treatments of the moral and behavioral foundations of market society, the relationship between wealth and political equality, the effects of commerce and luxury on social mores and personal morals, and, perhaps most importantly, the domestic and international consequences of economic exchange. The selected reading highlights the gradual dismantlement of the classical republican aversion to wealth accumulation, and the rehabilitation of avarice into an integrative (even edifying) social force.
Normative & Empirical Perspectives on International Law (graduate colloquium co-taught with Dr. Tonya Putnam)
This graduate colloquium aims to give students from different subfields of political science a rigorous cross-disciplinary foundation in key themes that cut across international relations, international law, and political theory. The themes covered by the seminar include territory, sovereignty, interstate cooperation & anarchy, the use of force, and human rights. Students will focus on conceptual, normative, and empirical articulations of each theme with an eye to the ways in which the insights from each disciplinary perspective reverberate in the development of international legal norms. The course also attends to how normative perspectives inform empirical work, and whether and how particular empirical presumptions underwrite normative perspectives. Course materials are drawn from classical texts in political philosophy, contemporary empirical scholarship, and legal documents.
