PopularSovereigntyRule of Law

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Citizens of established liberal democracies often take for granted the existence of the rule of law, constitutionalism, and functioning democratic institutions. We often forget that nations such as the United States are in many ways exceptions to the more general rule of constitutional democracy’s fragility. Religious sectarianism, ethnic strife, political corruption, tribalism, cronyism, authoritarianism, bloody civil wars, and even genocide are all regular features of the developing world. And yet not so long ago, we tend to forget, today’s settled Western liberal democracies such as England, France, and the United States struggled themselves to overcome some of the very same challenges. How did they manage successfully to navigate the process of democratization and establish the rule of law? What can other nations today learn from their experiences? How, concretely, can policy-makers seeking to foster the rule of law abroad profit from the lessons of the so-called “Age of Revolutions” or the “Long 18th century” running from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the defeat of Napoleon and the travails of post-Revolutionary France? We will be concerned in this seminar with making sense of classical political thinkers such as Locke, Smith, Burke, Hume, Madison, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville on their own terms and in their own historical milieu, but also and maybe more importantly with trying to understand what might be generalizable about their social and political theories. How might their theoretical insights enlighten, inform, or challenge contemporary efforts to foster the rule of law throughout the world?