Course Description:
“The Nature of Politics” is a foundational course for political science majors as well as those interested in the study of politics more generally. It introduces students to fundamental issues in political theory as it has developed from ancient Greece to the present day; in other words, we’ll encounter questions that are both historical and conceptual. We will ask, for example, how concepts like “the market” or “the social contract” come to connote political freedoms in contemporary politics, whether and to what extent “politics” is separate from other social realms such as the family or the economy, and why so many contemporary social movements see antiracism as a key political goal in the twenty-first century.
