PSIR401 CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY
Course Content
This course will seek to familiarise students with some of the key political thinkers and schools of thought of the 20th century. The 20th century was arguably the most tumultuous in history, punctuated by two great human cataclysms and almost continual warfare and ongoing struggles and pressures, largely inherited from the previous century. All of these pressures have their origin one way or another in the process referred to (often ambiguously) as ‘modernity’. Modernity can be marked off for our purposes as involving two essential revolutionary currents and upheavals. Firstly, in terms of the means of production - we have witnessed the spread and rapid proliferation of the economic practice of capitalism and industrialisation. This has led to the growth of class politics, well underway during the 19th century, and the politics of resistance, criticism, reform and revolution. Second, much political theorising has surrounded the means of administration which has drawn in particular debates on the nation-state and its mechanisms and the nature and would-be expectations of liberal democracy. We shall also consider the development of totalitarian alternatives to liberal democracy and the dangers associated with them.
