MC 370-003 Radical Challenges to Liberal Democracy James Madison College Michigan State University Fall 2012 TTh 12:40 2:00 pm, Case 340 Prerequisites: Completion of a Tier 1 writing requirement. Instructor of Record: Ross B. Emmett 304 South Case Hall Email: emmettr@msu.edu URLs: www.msu.edu/~emmettr & rossbemmett.com Office Hours: TTh 2 4 pm, or by appointment Yes, I am on Facebook, but I am only friends with graduates, not current students! You can check out my websites or follow me on Twitter or Linkedin. You have received an invitation to join our course s site on Piazza.com. The course syllabus is also available there and you will be asked to post reading response memos there. MC 370 is the third required course in the sequence of four core political theory courses in the Political Theory & Constitutional Democracy field. Following MC 271 which examined the Enlightenment literature often identified with classical liberalism MC 370 looks at a body of writings which ask whether classical liberalism actually brought liberty, equality and communal benevolence to the people, and whether more radical responses to hierarchy and oppression are necessary. Liberty, Equality, & Revolution At the heart of classical liberalism lay the rejection (in principle, if not in practice) of any form of natural hierarchy of any theory of politics, economics or society based on rank-ordered differences among people. If all people are equal, how then can they not also be free; and if all are free, how then can they not be equal? When the promise of freedom and equality went sour in the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution and the rampant individualism of America (starting before the purifying knife of the guillotine in France at the end of the 18 th century, but becoming especially strong during the 19 th century), Europeans asked whether other alternatives were available. All of the alternatives pursued seemed to imply a radical re-composition of society s institutions: using the word radical here in both the original sense of uprooting and the more modern sense which implies the use of violence or at least significant and rapid social upheaval. Whereas the American constitutional tradition explicitly identified itself with the British constitutional tradition, the European and radicals sought fundamentally to break with the past, and drew upon different sources. Rousseau, well known to the American Revolutionists (esp. Jefferson and Franklin), kicks off our readings with a rejection of the natural law arguments of many classical liberals: the institutions of society are not a natural progression (built upon an unchanging human nature) of the emergence of civil society from the state of nature; instead, we are the product of our own creations. Institutions make us what we are; and what we are is not pretty. Our original state may have been good, but we have been corrupted by the institutions we have built. The obvious response is: tear down the institutions and build new ones around the kind of humans we should be. In the spirit of Rousseau, the French did just that in 1789. To us, living in the 21 st century, the most significant alternative to liberalism and capitalism is socialism, and the writer we associate most with socialism is Karl Marx. Marx lived all of his life in the 19 th
century. However, he has to be considered one of the most important 20 th century figures, for it is in that century that his ideas were realized in the Russian Revolution, and socialist transformations in eastern Europe, Latin America, south Asia, and the Pacific Rim. Marx was not Rousseauean: while his writings affirm an eventual revolution in which the expropriators will be expropriated, he is a historical materialist and an evolutionist. The material conditions of society make us what we are, those conditions evolve slowly through a historical dialectic of struggle: The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle the opening words of The Communist Manifesto. But Marx is not always clear whether history can be helped along by a little cataclysmic revolution: the Manifesto, after all, was written to encourage the workers of the world to unite during the rebellions that swept Europe in 1848. Unfortunately for Marx, the workers ultimately aligned themselves with nationalist forces (another tradition that radicals will reject) rather than the cosmopolitan forces of socialism, the rebellions were squelched, and Marx ended up fleeing to London, where he lived out the rest of his life trying to understand how the underlying dynamic of capital in an enterprise economy would ultimately provide the material foundation for a socialist world. Was he right? Between Rousseau and Marx, we will look at the work of Adam Smith. You may think Smith is an unlikely candidate for inclusion in this course. But his ideas position him well between our two main characters. We often think of Enlightenment writers as all cut out of one cloth, but the truth of the matter is that the Scottish writers like Smith took a different path toward freedom and equality than Rousseau and Marx followed. Smith s moral writings are a clear response to Rousseau, and his political economy is the first major statement of the economic benefits of a free society. For Marx, showing the internal inconsistency of Smith s political economy became the vehicle for promoting socialism. Required Reading Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Basic Political Writings, Indianapolis, Hackett, 2012. Smith, Adam, Adam Smith: Selected Philosophical Writings (Library of Scottish Philosophy), edited by James R. Otteson, Imprint Academic, 2004. Tucker, R. C. (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2 nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978. One additional required reading from Adam Smith is available on Piazza s Resources page. Course Requirements A. Overview and Grading Weights Reading Response Memos on Piazza Min. req. Participation 20% Rousseau Essay 25% Smith Essay 25% Marx Essay 30% Please note: failure to complete the Marx essay constitutes failure to complete a major assignment in the course, and constitutes grounds for an automatic zero in the course (regardless of how well you do on other course requirements). Please consult with me as early as possible (prior to the due date!) if you are in any danger of not completing the Marx Essay.
B. Description of Each Course Requirement Participation Most class periods will be spent in lecture and discussion, based on the assigned reading. Hence, it is important that everyone has read the material for the day (the requirement to post discussion comments will ensure that a fair portion of the class has done the reading). Your participation grade will reflect your participation in class discussion. If you are not present in class, you cannot participate; if you are continually absent, your participation mark will necessarily be zero. Here is a rough guide to my grading of participation: A zero for frequent absences with no or very minimal comments/questions made in class; 1.0 for occasional class comments/questions and a lot of absences; 1.5 for no comments/questions in class even if attending regularly; 2.0 for very good attendance and some contributions; 2.5 for very good attendance and a few good contributions; 3.0 for showing familiarity with the readings, leadership in the direction of class discussion occasionally and attending regularly; 4.0 for regularly moving class discussion forward by providing productive comments based on the readings that contribute to discussion and also help others to enter/participate in the conversation. About the end of October, I will email you with a preliminary participation grade. The preliminary grade indicates the grade I would give you on the basis of your participation during the first half of the course. While you can discuss this grade with me, the best way to have an impact on the final grade is to change your participation during the latter half of the course. I will email revised participation grades between the end of classes and the final exam. Reading Response Memos Reading response memos ensure that the assigned reading has been read by a majority of the students participating in the day s discussion. Prior to class, you will respond with an answer of approximately 250 words to one of the questions regarding the day s reading that I post as an entry on Piazza. The reading response memos posting are not graded. However, if your postings become too short, too vague, too much of a summary, or too much like the posting of another student (!), I will inform you that your posting was not acceptable, and you will have to do another for a reading later in the course. Response memos posted more than 10 minutes after the beginning of class will not be accepted. As long as you post at least 17 acceptable reading response memos, your final grade will be determined by the other components of the course requirements, as indicated above. If you do not turn in 17 acceptable memos, your final grade will decrease.03 (on the 4-point scale) for every missed reading response memo. (If you never turn in a memo, 0.50 would be deducted from your final grade.) I may respond to a thread of responses on Piazza if questions arise as to the meaning of a passage in the reading response memos. Three Notes About Reading Response Memos: a) Reading response memos are posted before class. I will be checking each day before class to see what themes emerged in the memos, and Piazza records the time and date of each posting. If you are in the hospital for more than two weeks, please contact me while in the hospital to make arrangements. b) If in doubt about whether you can complete an acceptable memo for a particular reading, you should just pass. Remember, you simply need 17 acceptable daily memos on record by the end of the term. c) An acceptable memo roughly translates to at least a 2.5 on the 4-point scale.
Essays on Rousseau, Smith and Marx The essays on Rousseau, Smith and Marx will be based on the course readings, and will not require additional research (anything you want to do to assist your understanding is, of course, your own prerogative). For each essay, a question will be assigned that you must address in the paper. The question for each essay will be available at least one full week before the paper is due. The due date for each paper is listed on the course reading schedule: that is the last date upon which you can turn in an analytical essay on that option for full credit. Papers are to be emailed to the professor before 11 pm on the due date. The Rousseau and Smith papers are expected to be 6-8 pages, not including the page with your list of references. The Marx paper is expected to be 10-12 pages in length. The MLA Handbook is the preferred guide to format, style and other technical matters related to the preparation of your analytical essays. I have a STRONG PREFERENCE for the Handbook s author-date system of in-text citation, rather than the use of footnotes or endnotes. If you turn the Rousseau or Smith paper after the due date, the grade will be reduced by 0.5 per day (Saturday and Sunday count as 1 day, so a paper due on Friday and turned in Tuesday morning will have 1.0 deducted from its grade). The Marx paper cannot be turned in late because it substitutes for a final exam. If you don t complete it on time, you will receive a zero. Please remember: procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part! Expectations What you can expect from me My pedagogical goal in this course is to provide a structured environment in which you learn to think philosophically about our polity and governance. The focus will be on your learning, not my teaching. You learn by reading significant treatments of key problems in political theory, discussing these problems with your peers and professor. I will lecture, and will participate in the discussion, because I can enhance your learning by those means. Discussion will often spring from questions you have about the reading, and we will try to take time to make sure that issues you raise regarding your understanding of the reading will be covered. If you still have questions after we discuss the texts, please post your questions on Piazza for discussion by myself and other students. If you d rather talk with me directly, contact me by email or come to my office during office hours. You have a right to clear explanations of the expectations for assignments, and to prompt and adequate feedback about your performance. Information regarding my expectations for tests and other assignments will be provided in class. General feedback regarding student performance will also be provided in class. More specific individual feedback will be provided on your papers, and you may come to talk about your performance during my office hours. You can expect me to give you the same opportunity to participate in discussion that I give to other students. Your performance during university will be enhanced by contact outside the classroom with your professors. I welcome you to stop by my office early in the term to introduce yourself. I will respect my posted office hours, and can make appointments if the posted times are not convenient for you. Indeed, meeting with me occasionally during the term to discuss questions you have about the class can even increase your participation grade!
What I expect of you I expect you to attend class, to have read the assigned material in advance, and to have posted a reading response memo. I also expect you to come prepared for engagement in the discussion of topics related to the readings. Being engaged does not mean simply talking. Engagement with class discussion comes in many forms (sleeping through class is not one of them!), and thoughtful contributions that advance our common understanding of strategic thinking will be rewarded more than simply talking. I expect you to treat others with the same respect you expect from them. This version of the Golden Rule extends beyond your classmates to the individuals whom you are studying. I expect you to respect the rights of those whose ideas you utilize in writing your papers. Acknowledging the sources of your own ideas is an integral part of participation in a civil democratic society, especially in the academic context. That dreaded p-word plagiarism is ultimately an issue of respect. College and University policies regarding academic dishonesty will be enforced in this course (see the College Student Handbook). Honors Option Those interested in pursuing an H-Option for MC 370 should contact Dr. Emmett as soon as possible. I am available to meet with the H-Option students from 6:30-8 pm on Thursdays. I expect we d meet 5 times, starting in late September and running to mid-november with a couple of breaks. We will read selections from Critics of Capitalism: Victorian Reactions to Political Economy, edited by E. Jay and R. Jay (Cambridge University Press, 1986; available in paperback) and then conclude with John Maynard Keynes essay Economic Possibilities for my Grandchildren. Students will conclude the H-Option by writing a paper based on the connections between our course readings and the Honors option readings.
MC 370 003: Reading/Assignment Schedule All Rousseau readings are in The Basic Political Writings, 2 nd edition; all Smith readings are in Adam Smith: Selected Philosophical Writings; and all Marx-Engels readings are in The Marx Engels Reader. Assignment Due Dates Shaded Class Date Reading to be Discussed/Assignment Due Aug. 30 No Class: Dr Emmett Away. Familiarize yourself with the syllabus Sep. 4 Radical Challenges to Liberal Democracy and the Liberal Response: Opening Lecture Sept. 6 Rousseau, Discourse on the Science and the Arts, pp. 1-13 Sept. 11 Rousseau, Discourse on the Science and the Arts, pp. 14-25 Sept. 13 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, pp. 45-69 Sept. 18 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, pp. 69-92 Sept. 20 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, pp. 31-43 Discussion of Rousseau s Discourses Sept. 25 Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, pp. 123-52 Sept. 27 Rousseau, Social Contract, pp. 156-91 Oct. 2 Rousseau, Social Contract, pp. 191-52 Oct. 4 Rousseau and Adam Smith: Lecture Oct. 5 Rousseau Essay Due before 11 pm Oct. 9 Smith, Moral Theory, pp. 11-53 Oct. 11 Smith, Moral Theory, pp. 54-90 Oct. 16 Smith, Political Economy, pp. 91-136 Oct. 18 Smith, How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country, reading from Wealth of Nations available on Piazza.com Dennis Rasmussen (PTCD grad, now professor at Tufts) Skype session from 1:30 to 2:15 (stay if you can!) Oct. 23 Smith, Political Economy, pp. 136-93 Oct. 25 Smith and Karl Marx: Lecture Oct. 30 Marx-Engels Reader: The Communist Manifesto Nov. 1 Marx-Engels Reader: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 66-101 Nov. 2 Smith Essay Due before 11 pm Nov. 6 Marx-Engels Reader: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 101-25 Nov. 8 Marx-Engels Reader: Wage-Labor and Capital Nov. 13 Marx-Engels Reader: Capital, pp. 302-29 Nov. 15 Marx-Engels Reader: Capital, pp. 329-51 Nov. 20 Marx-Engels Reader: Capital, pp. 352-84 Nov. 22 No Class: Thanksgiving Nov. 27 Marx-Engels Reader: Capital, pp. 384-417 Nov. 29 No Class: Dr. Emmett Away Dec. 4 Marx-Engels Reader: Capital, pp. 417-438 Dec. 6 Marx-Engel s Reader: Critique of the Gotha Program, and After the Revolution, pp. 525-48 Fri., Dec. 14 Marx Essay Due Before 11 pm.