Descriptif

What is the measure of human social interaction and historical change? In what terms should we understand ourselves, our world and our actions?

Progress, reason, justice, the accumulation of capital, the exploitation of nature and more have all been offered up as a lens through which to view our world and its history. In this course, we'll examine past and present institutions and phenomena through the notion of power struggle as defined by different thinkers in different times: Hobbes and Locke, Nietzsche, Arendt, Noam Chomsky and Foucault, Val Plumwood.

Students will engage with these conceptions of power and political philosophies as well as with the historical conjonctures in which they arise: from the trial of Charles I to our contemporary climate crisis.

Students will choose an object or event and argue how it constitutes a mechanism of power or reflects a particular clash of forces.