American Political Thought

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

“O, let America be America again,” Langston Hughes wrote: “The land that never has been yet – and yet must be – the land where every man is free.” Throughout the history of the United States, many, like Hughes, have described its founding ideas as inspirational yet unfulfilled. But what are these political ideas, this American “dream deferred”? Through what events, debates, and writings have these ideas developed throughout the past centuries? In this course we will survey the intellectual history of American political ideas from their English roots to the mid-twentieth century. Along the way we will critically examine abstract ideas such as freedom, equality, representation, labor, rights, and citizenship as they develop in the United States alongside histories of colonization, slavery, industrialization, immigration, war, and so on. Students will engage with these developments through a wide variety of primary sources: through pamphlets, declarations, speeches, memoirs, novels, debates, treatises, and court decisions. From these readings we will analyze American political thought as developed not simply by politicians and philosophers but by those on the margins as well. Our goals will be both to master the substantive ideas of multiple American political traditions and to understand the historical, economic and sociological contexts in which they emerged. In keeping with Hughes’s declaration, we will also assess the relevance and realization of these political traditions in our contemporary political context.