Courses—Instructor of Record
GOV 312: Constitutional Principles: Core Texts (full syllabus available upon request; taught for one semester as a large lecture course and two semesters as a small seminar)
Course Description: The United States of America is unique in that it was founded on the basis of ideas. Prominent among these ideas are democracy, liberty, and equality. The fundamental objective of this course is to identify how people have understood and contested those ideas over the course of American history. The course begins with the major political writings of John Locke in order to elucidate the theoretical foundations of liberalism. (Thomas Jefferson, who played a major role in drafting the U.S. Declaration of Independence, famously included Locke among his “trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced”). Next we immerse ourselves in the debate concerning the ratification of the United States Constitution, giving consideration to both the document’s advocates and its opponents, and their major axes of disagreement. We also spend several weeks reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in order to discern the strengths and pathologies this French visitor perceived in the American way of life. Tocqueville illuminated better than anyone else before or since the tension between the two principles of liberty and equality. The ideals that the United States claims to champion have historically not been a reality for many of its citizens. In the final unit of the course, we read selections from the writings of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X to see what American principles mean to people who have suffered under slavery, or experienced the indignity of second-class citizenship.
GOV 312: Constitutional Principles: Core Texts (full syllabus available upon request; taught for one semester as a large lecture course and two semesters as a small seminar)
Course Description: The United States of America is unique in that it was founded on the basis of ideas. Prominent among these ideas are democracy, liberty, and equality. The fundamental objective of this course is to identify how people have understood and contested those ideas over the course of American history. The course begins with the major political writings of John Locke in order to elucidate the theoretical foundations of liberalism. (Thomas Jefferson, who played a major role in drafting the U.S. Declaration of Independence, famously included Locke among his “trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced”). Next we immerse ourselves in the debate concerning the ratification of the United States Constitution, giving consideration to both the document’s advocates and its opponents, and their major axes of disagreement. We also spend several weeks reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in order to discern the strengths and pathologies this French visitor perceived in the American way of life. Tocqueville illuminated better than anyone else before or since the tension between the two principles of liberty and equality. The ideals that the United States claims to champion have historically not been a reality for many of its citizens. In the final unit of the course, we read selections from the writings of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X to see what American principles mean to people who have suffered under slavery, or experienced the indignity of second-class citizenship.
