American Political Thought

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course offers an advanced graduate survey of American political thought from Puritan politics in the seventeenth century to pragmatism in the early twentieth. Our goal is not only to study dominant concepts and controversies in this period – issues of representation, democracy, republicanism, slavery, violence, labor, gender, or race – but to place these abstract ideas in historical context and consider their contemporary relevance. Of great importance to our seminar will be the focus not simply on American political thought’s founding figures but its dissidents, disenfranchised and dispossessed. Beyond this theoretical and historical approach lies a broader political question to guide our seminar: what, if anything, distinguishes the theorists, theories and methods of American political thought? As a graduate seminar, students will be responsible for considerable reading in primary and secondary materials, a formal presentation, and a major research paper.