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Prerequisites: One Philosophy course, or one political theory Government course, or permission of instructor.
Distributives: TMV
Modern life requires Big Things: Roads, railways, sewers, housing, power plants, digital platforms, dams, and the like. This course investigates the theory and practice of infrastructure. It takes up questions such as: Are democracies worse than autocracies at building infrastructure? What role should the government have in building infrastructure? What big things do we want built? How do planning, permitting, financing, and building infrastructure relate to democratic values? Readings will be drawn from philosophy, political science, law, economics, and other cognate disciplines.
Philanthropy is a political activity. It is shaped by public policies such as tax incentives, it reflects and reinforces norms of wealth accumulation and inequality, it supports social movements, and it funds the infrastructure of public life. This course will cover philanthropy's evolving relationship to democracy, its role in legitimizing capitalism and the privatization of the common good, and possibilities for reconciling the demands of justice with the ideal of pluralism in charitable giving.
This course will provide an in-depth understanding of the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, including its historical development, normative and structural elements, and modern role as a driver of social change, with a focus on sustainable development. By the end of the course, students will have knowledge of the history and structure of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, the tradition of competing value commitments in civil society, and key issues in the current nonprofit and philanthropic sector. Readings for this class will span across political philosophy, civil society studies, public policy, law reviews, and popular journalism.
Building on Frederick Douglass's penetrating question—"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"—this interdisciplinary course explores American attitudes toward patriotism. What does it mean to be a patriot? How should one's love of country be balanced with critiques of its injustices? What's race got to do with it? We will trace the evolution of black political thought since the Revolutionary War against the backdrop of debates about patriotism in contemporary politics, culture, and philosophy. By the end of the course, we will have surveyed a wide array of African American thinkers and their various interpretations of patriotism, including the radical thought of Malcolm X; the liberal ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mary McLeod Bethune, Ralph Ellison, and Shirley Chisholm; the conservative convictions of Zora Neale Hurston, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice; the civic optimism of Barack Obama; and the pessimistic proclamations of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose parents spurned the Fourth of July as "marketed by the people who wanted to be white." In so doing, we will recognize how re-examining the history of the United States through the eyes of the African Americans who labored to redefine its founding principles might illuminate new pathways for progress in our present age of polarization and moral relativism. Ultimately, we will consider a variety of answers to questions of how influential African Americans understood patriotism and what their insights might mean for the future of race relations in the United States.
Democracy in America has long been thought to be a model of the world, a 'city on a hill.' And in the late 20th century, America has been cast – and has seen itself – as the leader of the free world. Today American leaders no longer see the U.S. as a leader. Nor does much of the rest of the world. What is the state of democracy in America, and what do we have to hope for and to fear on its behalf?