FordhamCollege Honors Program
HPRU 2052-001 Mon/Thurs 11:30 AM-12:45 PM
Dealy Hall 101
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL & POLITICAL THOUGHT: Spring semester 2006
E. Doyle McCarthy, Dept. Sociology & Anthropology
(718) 817-3855 Dealy Hall 405A
Office hours: Mon and Thurs. 4-5 PM (Honors students only) and by appointment
Course Description
This is a course that covers some of the principal works in social and political thought of the modern age, 18th through early 20th Century. One of the principal themes of the course is the “modern,” to what does it refer? What types of thinking and acting distinguish modern societies from societies of the medieval period? Why did these societies develop in the West and not somewhere else? What do we mean by the distinguishing characteristics of “modern man”? In what ways are modern philosophies to be distinguished by ancient and medieval philosophies? These are some of the questions taken up by the authors we will read in this course, Montesquieu on the physical and cultural conditions that give rise to particular types of governments, Kant on the distinctive features of “Enlightenment” thinking, Tocqueville on the types of societies and persons that live in modern democracies, Marx on the rise of modern economies and their effects, Weber on the origins of the modern capitalist “spirit” in the Reformation doctrines of the 16th Century.
Among the many distinguishing features of the “modern age” are its sciences. The course begins with 18th Century Enlightenment science. It is not until the period of the Enlightenment in the 18th Century that the idea of a “science of man” or human science is born. This course traces the history of the human sciences from this period. Certain select themes of the 18th Century through the early 20th Century are studied and discussed: the modern idea of “society” as communities and organizations that change, grow, and develop; the search for an objective science of society; the use of reason and social science to advance individual freedom, humanity, and the social order; the origins and history of the idea of the “individual” and democracy.
The texts of the course introduce the reader to some of the principal viewpoints of those writers who first inquired into modern social and political organization. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws is an Enlightenment treatise as well as a first work in political sociology. Works by Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and Max Weber are read for their distinctive ideas concerning industrial democracies and for their different conceptions of modern social and political development and its future. Sigmund Freud’s Future of an Illusion (1927)and Civilization and its Discontents (1930) exemplify modernity’s discovery (or invention) of the unconscious and its use as a method of interpretation of human reason and consciousness as well as for interpreting the entire domain of human culture from art to science. Freud’s perspective also introduces something new into the intellectual perspectives of 20th Century modernism. Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), republished with a 1996 Afterword by the author, traces the history of the culture of capitalism from its inception to the twentieth century where capitalism’s “victory” undermines its foundation in religious asceticism. Bell’s work opens up the distinctly late 20th Century inquiry into the fundamental changes in post-industrial societies, societies now portrayed as “post-modern.” The course closes with a brief look into the “post modern” and its undermining of modernist claims and perspectives.
Required Books (in bookstore; students are asked to use these editions for the seminar)
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America Vol. 2 (1835/1990) Vintage Books.
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The German Ideology (1845-48/1970) International
Publishers.
Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905/1992) Routledge.
Sigmund Freud The Future of an Illusion (1927/1961) Norton.
Civilization and its Discontents (1930/1961) Norton.
Daniel Bell The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism 1996 anniversary edition, Basic
Books.
Additional Required Readings(copies provided for the student; some are on electronic reserve)
Selections from Montesquieu The Spirit of Laws. (1748) Edited with an Introduction by
David Wallace Carrithers. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Peter Gay “The Science of Man.” The Enlightenment.
Immanuel Kant “What is Enlightenment?” (1784)
Michel Foucault “What is Enlightenment?” (1984)
Friedrich Nietzsche selections from Human, All Too Human (1878): translator’s
Introduction, author’s Preface, Sections 1, 6 & 9.
Immanuel Wallerstein “The End of What Modernity?” (1995)
Jean-François Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on KnowledgeMinneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press ([1979] 1984), a selection.
Main Texts Studied
Montesquieu (1689-1755) The Spirit of Laws (1748)
Montesquieu has been described as the most influential writer of the 18th Century. Laws was one of the most popular books of the century. It was also a book brought under severe scrutiny from churchmen (Jansenists and Jesuits alike) and monarchists; the book was Indexed in 1751. In its Preface, Montesquieu claims to have drawn his principles from facts—the nature of things—rather than from prejudice; its goal, in part, was to enlighten people concerning their prejudices.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) Democracy in America Vol. 2. (1835)
Tocqueville classic treatise is an original statement about America as well as the “democratic revolution” of the 19th Century. The work gives us an image of democracy, its inclinations, character, prejudices, and passions. The book is written “…to learn what we have to fear or to hope from [democracy’s] progress.”
Karl Marx (1818-1883) The German Ideology (1845-1848)
This work, written by Marx and Engels, is the first concise statement of historical materialism and its aim, “to settle accounts” with certain philosophical issues and figures within the Hegelian schools (Old Hegelians, Young Hegelians, including those left, center, and right). The authors set out the key terms: modes or means of production, forces or production or productive forces, and the relationship between the stages in the division of labor and the relations of production. Supplementary Marxist texts provide a critique of the bourgeois idea of the individual.
Max Weber (1864-1920) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
Weber’s challenge to Marxist method and his own distinct contribution to German “cultural sociology,” includes this brilliant analysis of the ideational roots of capitalist economic organization in the Reformation doctrines of Martin Luther and John Calvin and their 17th Century heirs. He argues for the “elective affinity” of these doctrines regarding salvation and the “style of life” necessary for the building up of capitalism and its commercial and this-worldly ethos.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Human, All Too Human (1878) selections from the work. Only after Nietzsche’s death did his works attract both attention and adulation; they continue to do so today. Nietzsche’s enormous legacy to twentieth century intellectuals—it is more difficult to compile a list thinkers who were not influenced by this genius than those who were—can be found in his arguments concerning the “will to power,” the workings of the unconscious, and his critiques of conventional morality and absolute knowledge. This is an early work of Nietzsche’s written in the spirit of the 18th century Enlightenment and in the well-established genre of the aphorism: “To the cynicism typical of the genre,” he brings “a new dimension by his combination of nihilistic energy with his historical consciousness…[and he] expands the genre to include not merely insights, but arguments as well…” (p. xix). In seminar we begin by reading Section 1, “Of First and Last Things,” which traces the various ideas about the nature and origin of metaphysical beliefs.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1930) The Future of an Illusion (1927)
and Civilization and its Discontents (1930)
Civilization…is Freud’s grimmest book. In it he argues that a growing sense of guilt is the necessary force of civilized humanity. Without guilt, humanity’s aggressive and egotistical self-interest threatens to undo and overcome the human condition. In Future of an Illusion, Freud was more hopeful—hopeful that Enlightenment Reason could prevail, that human beings could renounce illusions, accept reality, and turn to science to understand their condition and their fate. Both books are “enlightened” treatises—one a dark vision, another a hopeful one—by a modernist believer in science as the hope of humankind.
Daniel Bell The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976; anniversary edition, 1996)
Bell is considered one of the foremost commentators of 20th Century capitalism. This volume and his earlier The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, identified the important ways that industrial capitalism changes during the post-World War II period with the growth of the service sector, consumerism, and the extension of global capitalism. Bell is a critic of postmodernism and …Contradictions can be read as a moral treatise on the rise of a culture of hedonism—a culture inimical to the ascetic culture of classical capitalism. It is also a book by a thinker and an aesthete, one with a mastery of fields ranging from art and aesthetics to politics and sociology.
Course Requirements
Attendance at each of the seminar classes is required. Students are expected to come with their readings in hand, having read them and prepared to discuss the readings at each class and to lead some of the seminar discussions.
Reasons for absences are always reported. 15% of the final grade will be based on seminar preparation and participation. (Students who do not regularly participate in the seminar discussions cannot receive a grade of A or A- in this course.)
30% on midterm & final exam, 15 pts. each exam, short answer essays questions with choice.
Midterm (Thursday, March 2 or having concluded Montesquieu, Kant, Foucault, & Tocqueville);
final exam Thursday May 11 on Marx, Weber, Freud, Bell.
45% of the grade will be based on three 5-page essays (each 15 pts.) on the works read in class. These essays do not follow the research paper format; they are critical essays written about a single theme or issue that the work raises; some use of original text citations and secondary course material(s) are expected in the papers.
Paper 1 on Montesquieu or a comparison of Kant & Foucault due by Thurs., Feb 9.
Paper 2 on Tocqueville or Marx: Mon., April 10 (or emailed by noon Fri. April 14).
Paper 3 on Freud or Bell as modernist thinkers: Mon., May 8 (during Reading Days).
10% of the final grade is based on a log or notebook where each student keeps narrative notes and reflections on the weekly reading assignments. The purpose of the log is for the students to maintain a record of notes, taken in narrative form, that highlight important aspects of the readings along with a written responses to the readings. About 2 pages written weekly (1+ pages wordprocessed). These are not graded; you receive full credit on your weekly work if you keep your logs current and do them as directed. I will collect the logs about 2-3 times during the semester and make some comments on what you have written. It is important that you keep up these journals week by week;
you will lose points as long as the journals are pastdue.
LOGS ARE DUE AT THE CLASS WHEN WE CONCLUDE A WORK.
ALWAYS BRING YOUR LOG TO CLASS ON THAT DAY.
Dates to remember:
Opera/Rigoletto Wed Feb 15; Interdisciplinary seminar Faculty & Students: Tues April 4.
Selected secondary sources for the course include:
Raymond Aaron Main Currents in Sociological Thought Vols.I & II.
Jeffrey Alexander & Steven Seidman Culture & Society: Contemporary Debates (1990)
Louis Althusser Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx (1959)
______. For Marx. (1969) (1969)
Hannah Arendt The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1958).
R.G. Collingwood The Idea of History. New York: OxfordUniversity Press (1956)
Norbert Elias The Civilizing Process. (1978)
Peter Gay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation
Vol I: The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966)
Vol II: The Science of Freedom (1969)
Peter Gay Reading Freud: Explorations & Entertainments (1990).
Anthony Giddens Capitalism & Modern Social Theory (1971)
Robert Heilbroner The Worldly Philosophers (1972)
H. Stuart Hughes Consciousness & Society: The Reorientation of European
Social Thought 1890-1930. (1958)
Mark Hulling Montesquieu and the Old Regime (1976)
Robert Nisbet The Social Philosophers (1973)
Marshall Sahlins Culture & Practical Reason. (1976)
Edward W. Said Orientalism. (1978)
J.B. Schneewind The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy
New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998.
Steven Seidman and David G. Wagner Postmodernism & Social Theory (1992)
Quentin Skinner The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (1985)
Charles Taylor Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)
Immanuel Wallerstein After Liberalism (1995)
Hayden White Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973)
Raymond Williams Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture & Society (1983 edition)
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