Introduction
The world around us is in many ways dramatically different than the world of five hundred (or even one hundred) years ago. Something happened. This course traces the development of a new way of looking at the world, a new way of using power that emerged slowly in an obscure corner of the world but moved with ever greater speed and intensity to put its imprint on every part of the globe. What was new about this world view and what made it so successful? How did it change the meaning of politics? What are the alternatives? And where are we going from here? Before we tackle these questions, you may have some questions about the course. I have tried to answer them here, but if you still have questions, please let me know.
This course is about politics at its most fundamental. To understandihow politics has changed we must devote considerable attention to the historical developments, from the conquests of Napoleon to the Second World War and the Cold War, from imperialism to decolonization, from the French revolution to the Russian revolution to the revolutions that overthrew communism in Eastern Europe. Understanding how various political systems differ from one another requires us to look closely at particular developments within particular countries--a quest that will take us from the British Empire and the United States to Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union and finally to such countries as Brazil, Nigeria and China.
But this course is not about any particular period of history or any particular country. Rather, it is about the coming of a way of thought that we now associate with the phrase "modernity" and how it changed the world for good and ill. The first section of the course shows how the new way of thought differed from the old and inspired different patterns of organization and methods of using power. In the second section we will look at a particular form of new thinking called liberalism and trace how it has shaped the western world. In the third section we focus on critiques of liberalism and the political movements these critiques have produced in Europe and North America. In the fourth section we concentrate on the reactions and responses in Africa, Asia and South America. In the fifth and final section we become more speculative. We look at the changes in our world and what the future holds.
This course is for you if you have an interest in politics, and if you want to gain a better understanding of how societies organize themselves and how their members wield power. You probably should not take this course if you cannot devote a reasonable amount of time and energy to reading carefully, thinking deeply, and writing well.
Goals
The course is designed to help you achieve the following six objectives:
- To acquire some additional facts about the world in which we live.
- To understand the basic concepts that political scientists use to study the world.
- To be able to apply the concepts you learn in class to understand what is happening in the world.
- To write well. This includes both a clear, engaging writing style and organization that gets to the point yet does not oversimplify.
- To think and work with others. This means using the full potential of various kinds of in-person and electronic conversations to learn more than you could on your own.
- To learn how to learn. This includes an ability to research a topic and find out what you need to know from all available sources, direct or indirect, printed or electronic.
Methods
Every class period will involve an integrated mix of lecture and discussion. Brief lectures will touch on and complement the readings assigned for class. In-class discussions will tie together the lectures and readings and give you the opportunity to add your own insights about the questions we are discussing and to help you get inside the heads of the people we read about and understand why they acted as they did. Every class period will therefore demand full participation. The writing assignments will challenge you to think more deeply about particular topics covered in the course and to apply what you have learned to new situations. They will also help you develop your ability to conduct research, to construct cogent arguments, to write with clarity and precision, and to work together with people (and machines) to achieve those goals.
Assignments
The following list of assignments and expectations should give you an idea of what you will need to do in this course and how I will evaluate your work:
| Category | Method of evaluation | Assignment Details | Due | Value | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Each | Sum | ||||
| Application, Writing, and Research | Papers I will grade papers for responsiveness to question, quality of thesis statement, argument, evidence, organization, and grammar and syntax! See more on how I grade. |
Diagnostic Paper (2 pages) | Wednesday, September 19 | 5% | 60% |
| Second Paper (4-5 pages) | Monday, November 19 | 25% | |||
| Third Paper (5-6 pages) | Wednesday, December 19 | 30% | |||
| Research and Collaboration | Web-Based
Exercises I will grade these exercises for responsiveness to question and (where relevant) quality of thesis statement, argument, evidence and organization. All participants in a particular collaboration/collectivity will receive the same grade. |
Webquest | Wednesday, October 3 | 5% | 20% |
| Collaborative Assignment | Monday, October 15 | 10% | |||
| Collective Assignment | Wednesday, October 31 | 5% | |||
| Retention | Question
of the Day Each day I will ask a question from the reading that is due. At the end of the semester, I will sum these for each student and assess a grade on a curve. |
Every class | 10% | ||
| Expression | Classroom
Participation I will evaluate your responsiveness classroom discussion. I will expect you to be capable at any time of voicing intelligent opinions based on prior reading |
Every class | 10% | ||
| Presence | Attendance
and Required Assignments More than two unexcused/ unexplained absences may lower your grade by a full grade. Failure to complete any of the required assignments (those above as well as the initial contact and map quiz) will result in a grade of F. |
Every class | Sine qua non |
||
| Overall | 100% | ||||
The following paragraphs should help to clarify my expectations in these categories:
Papers. Good writing is good thinking. Writing is one of the most important things you can learn while you are at Wayne State. Although this is a large class you will still have several good opportunities to practice and refine your writing. These will determine fully half of your grade.
Content and Style. Good writing is good thinking. Writing is one of the most important things you can learn at university. Therefore, papers will be marked and graded as if this were an English class. If you are having problems, please take the opportunity to talk with me about possible remedies, and I will do whatever I can to help. You can find on-line guides to writing in the English language at the Grammar and Style resources website and at Wayne's Academic Success Center on the second floor of the Undergraduate Library. There is also a very good website called "The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing" which is a companion to Michael Harvey's book of the same name, and has excellent coverage on a variety of writing questions including paper arguments, style, organization and plagiarism. Another set of resources (one that is in some ways even better) can be found in the links bookmarked by Jo Guldi on del.icio.us (in particular see those from poynter and askoxford). I have also received the permission from a few former students to post some examples well-written student essays that I have received in the past at Wayne, in the hope that these may offer some guidance.
If your ambition extends beyond writing correctly to writing well (and I hope it does), you cannot ask for better guides than the following two authors:
- William Zinsser, On Writing Well, Chapters 2 through 4.
- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language
Citing your sources. In our information-based society, ideas are as precious as the gold of earlier eras. Stealing someone else's ideas is no more acceptable than stealing someone else's possessions, and it will get you in a lot of trouble. But why steal something that is already free? The only cost to you as a student for using somebody else's ideas is that you must give them appropriate credit and that is very easy to do. If you get any idea from any source, you must cite that source, even if you do not use the same wording. In other words, you must cite the source even if you rewrite it in your own words. Furthermore, if you use an author's specific wording for more than three words in sequence ("In the beginning...", you must put the words in quotation marks. For more guidance, I have adapted guidelines written Dr. Noel Parker of the University of Surrey on when and why to cite others' words. In general, please simply follow the adage: 'when in doubt, cite your source'" (Cason 1998). The previous sentence is a case in point. I found the quotation on the web-site of Prof. Jeffrey Cason at Middlebury College. If this syllabus had a section for Literature Cited, it would contain the following entry:
Cason, Jeffrey. 1998. Course Requirements. Available WWW:
http://cweb.middlebury.edu/ps103a-s98/requirements.html [Accessed 17 August 1999].For the sake of clarity, I will require you to follow a particular format for citations. My choice is the author-date method as defined in the Chicago Manual of Style, which I have used in the example above. The format consists of a parenthetical reference within the text (Author Year of Publication, Page Number) and a full elaboration of the reference in a Literature Cited section at the end of your paper. I have put full guidelines for citation on-line, but I would also be happy to give you a printed copy.
If you have any questions or doubts about what to cite, you must contact me before you hand in a paper with questionable references. It is better to use up a grace day or two to come up with your own ideas and properly cite those that you take from others than to risk your grade--perhaps even your college career--by needlessly using somebody else's ideas and failing to credit them. Of course the most serious problems with citation are not accidental omissions but intentional efforts to save thought and effort by simply copying what somebody else has already done.
The consequence of plagiarism is automatic failure
The paper assignments in this course cannot be answered by anything you can buy or copy whole from the internet or fellow students, and I have become extremely adept at identifying the sources of plagiarism. Unfortunately, there have been enough attempts (none successful) that I must now subject papers to a random screening process involving test-based search engines and the surprisingly discerning services of the university's web-based plagiarism detector. In the unlikely event that a student still finds it necessary to plagiarize, I will deal with such incidents in accordance with the provisions of the Student Due Process Statue specified in the university's Academic Integrity statement, which you can obtain online at: www2.lisp.wayne.edu/services/integrityjuly06.pdf.
Format. Unless you have prior approval from me, you must prepare your papers and on a word processor in one of four formats: text (.txt), rich text (.rtf), Microsoft Word (.doc) or Word Perfect (.wpd). Please do not submit papers in MicrosoftWorks (.wks), Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf) or MicrosoftWord 2007 (.docx). Papers must be double spaced, with reasonable font size (10-12) and margins (1 inch), and within the specified length guidelines. All these guidelines are there for your benefit as well as for mine. A paper that is too long bears evidence of inability to be concise and organized. A paper that is too short suggests that something is missing. Finally, think for at least a moment about aesthetics. Before submitting a paper that is messy, crammed together or otherwise unreadable, think about how it will affect the mood of your instructor (upon whose cheerfulness depends your grade.)
Electronic Paper Submission. Papers are due by 11:59:59 p.m. on the specified due date. Unless you have discussed alternatives with me, you should submit each paper electronically through the Digital Drop Box that is available under the "Tools" section of the course page on Blackboard (http://blackboard.wayne.edu). This will provide a formal record of the paper's submission including a time and date stamp. It also allows you to submit your papers from home or work. Unless we have agreed ahead of time I will not accept papers sent solely by email because there is no way to verify claims that papers have been sent.
Electronic Research and Writing Tools: In order to help you become familiar with the tools that you will need for your future careers, I will invite you to make active use of the following:
- del.icio.us/tag/ps1000 (for creating public bookmarks. Tag with 'ps1000' to create a collaborative knowledge base)
- The course wiki page (for various signups and for the collaborative web assignment): http://ps1000.pbwiki.com
Deadlines. Students will have a total of three days (72 hours, to be precise) of grace which can be applied in any combination to any of the papers (but not to the collaborative assignments). You may allot your 72 hours among the papers in any way you want. (You can, for example, submit one 72 hours late and all of the rest on time. Or you can submit one 10 hours late, one 20 hours late and one 42 hours late. Any combination is acceptable as long as the total does not exceed 72 hours). Plan ahead, because in exchange for this flexibility, I will hold you to high standards of punctuality. Once grace time is used up, grades for late assignments immediately drop by a full letter (making a B into a C, for example) and continue to drop by one grade for each 24 hour period of lateness. There will be no exceptions, barring written evidence of trauma or tragedy. Be forewarned that papers handed in late may not be handed back to you as promptly as those handed in on time. Grace days used on the final paper may delay the posting of your grade beyond the university's "three day" rule.
Evaluation. An excellent paper must demonstrate a strong argument expressed in a coherent thesis statement and developed in an organized fashion using appropriate argument and evidence. Grammar and syntax are also crucial. I will grade papers as if this were an English class. An abundance of grammatical and usage errors can have a severely negative effect on your grade. If you have questions, I have prepared an extremely detailed account of how I grade written work.
Web Collaboration. Since the class addresses the future, it seems fitting that we should spend some time there. Some assignments will require you to combine skills that look to be important for the coming decades: collective intelligence (using the "wisdom of crowds," or in this case, groups) and distributed processing (successfully combining the diverse skills of individuals and the particular skills of machines to solve a problem). Since identifying the worth of individual contributions to such collaborations is impossible, the final grade for each individual student will reflect the quality of the overall product of the group. This will raise interesting problems of coordination that you will need to resolve collectively.
Question of the Day: Every class day will begin with a single question that will be easily answerable if you did the reading and virtually impossible to answer if you did not. At the end of the semester I will tally these up and factor them into your grade.
Other Required Assignments
Initial Contact. In order to make sure that we can remain in contact, I will ask you to send me an email during the first week of class that contains your most-used email address, any websites/blogs/pages that you maintain (and care to share), and your del.icio.us login name (one which you will quickly need to create if you do not have one already).
Map Test. You cannot speak intelligently about other countries and cultures unless you know where they are. In the second week of class I will ask you to take a map quiz in which you locate 20 countries on a blank map of the world. I will keep giving the quiz until every student in class can locate 19 out of 20. The list of countries is as follows:
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Click here for a world maps identical to the blank map you will be using in .pdf format (566KB searchable) or jpg format (154KB, not searchable) or a slightly different set of maps including including, another world map in .jpg format (50KB, not searchable) and more detailed maps of Africa and Europe, Asia and North and South America. There are also several helpful on-line geography quizzes to be found online that will test your knowledge well beyond the limited list of countries below.
Participation
While you are in class, I expect you to be fully
engaged. This means that you must have a willingness to
respond to my questions (which will be constant) and to ask questions
of your own. Unprepared rambling, stony silence, or regular
absence can reduce your grade. You must also demonstrate a respect for
the comments and questions of others.
Attendance. Class attendance is mandatory. More than two absences can result in a penalty of one full letter grade. Habitual lateness is indistinguishable from absence and will incur the same penalty.
Final Grades. These depend on you, but you should know that I am a difficult grader and that I award grades of "A" only to work that could be regarded as exceptional in any university in the country. I regard grades of A- and B+ as appropriate for work that is very good but not exceptional. No student can receive a passing grade without completing all required assignments; it is not enough simply to do well on most assignments and leave one or two undone.
Accessibility
Every student should have the best possible chance to engage in learning. If you are registered with the Educational Accessibility Services (EAS) office, please see me during the first week of class so that we can determine how I can help you. Please bring your paperwork from EAS to our meeting.
Books and materials
We will be reading a variety of types of writing in this course. Most of the readings are available on-line (for free!) but some are not. The table below offers links to the articles, but there is one book you must purchase. I have ordered this book through Marwill's Bookstore (313-832-3078) on Cass and Warren but it may not yet be available. Since these is a popular book with multiple past editions, those wishing to save money want to find used versions at local used book stores such as John K. King's Bookstore, 901 W. Lafayette, (313-961-0622). I have also included links to relevant pages on Half.com, Powells.com and the 'used' section of Amazon.com.
| Achebe, Chinua. 1958. Things
Fall Apart. Any press, any edition. Powell's Books Half.com Amazon.com |
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We will make as much use as possible of electronic resources. Many readings below, therefore, will require you to follow links to internal- or external- sites containing the relevant text. In some cases, furthermore, I will ask you to use on-line databases such as JSTOR and Project Muse to which Wayne State subscribes. These are available from any on-campus computer and with off-campus computers that are correctly configured using Wayne State's Virtual Private Network.
If you would like to print any materials out for free using the computers in the Political Science Department's computer lab, you need only let me know and have a sufficient supply of paper. Wherever you may decide to read or print the on-line material, you are responsible for downloading material at least one week before so that you are not caught out by a dead link or other error. If you have problems with downloading any material, contact me immediately so that I can find some way to get you a copy that you can read before class.
While it is not technically part of the course, I will also ask you to follow contemporary political developments in the U.S. and elsewhere. To keep you up to date, you may find it helpful to subscribe to the New York Times Online and to The Economist weekly political review. These are free and they represent a better way spend your precious media-time than attending to most newspapers, or commercial radio and television networks. (In fact there are few human activities less useful than watching TV news).
The Class Schedule
This list represents a minimum set of readings for the course. I reserve the privilege of making additions over time, but I promise to inform you about any such changes well in advance.
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Section I. Tradition and Modernity |
|
Class 1, Wednesday, September 5 |
|
Class 2, Monday, September 10 Read Bendix, Max Weber,
"Domination,
Organization and Legitimacy," pp. 290-297 Start writing: First Paper, as explained in the Class Wiki, due at 11:59:59 p.m. on Wednesday, September 19 |
|
Class 3, Wednesday, September 12 Read Achebe, Things Fall Apart,
Chapters 8 through 13 |
|
Class 4, Monday, September 17 Read Black et al, Rebirth, Chapter
One,
"
Europe
Triumphant
" |
|
Class 5, Wednesday, September 19 Read Landes, The Unbound Prometheus,
Part
II Hand in: First Paper to the Digital Drop Box in Blackboard (http://blackboard.wayne.edu) by 11:59:59 p.m. |
|
Class 6, Monday, September 24 Read Marx, The Communist Manifesto,
Intro
and
Section
I, |
|
Classes 7-9, Wednesday, September 26 to Wednesday,
October 3 Go: To the library research training session,
according to the schedule posted
here on the class Wiki.
Start writing: The Collaborative Assignment, explained here on the class Wiki, due at 11:59:59 p.m. on Monday, October 15. |
| Class 10, Monday, October 8 Now... Where Were We? Read
The Magna Carta |
|
Class 11, Wednesday, October 10 Read Mill, "On Liberty,"
Chapter
1, Introductory |
|
Class 12, Monday, October 15 Read Lijphart,
Democracies,
Chapters
2 and 3 Hand in: The Collaborative Assignment by 11:59:59 p.m. |
|
Class 13, Wednesday, October 17 Read The Economist,
"The
Perils of Complacency" |
|
Class 14, Monday, October 22 Read Marx, "The Communist Manifesto,"
Section
II and
Section
III |
|
Class 15, Wednesday, October 24, Read Stalin,
"Concerning
the Policy of Eliminating the Kulaks as a Class" |
|
Class 16, Monday, October 29 Read Communist Party of the Soviet Union, "
Perestroika
" Start working on: The Collective Assignment, explained here on the class Wiki, due on Wednesday, November 7 |
|
Class 17, Wednesday, October 31 Read Levitsky and Way "Competitive
Authoritarianism" |
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Class 18, Monday, November 5 Read Gellner, Nations and Nationalism,
Chapter 1 |
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Class 19, Wednesday, November 7 Read Mussolini, "What
is Fascism" Finish: The Collective Assignment, explained here on the class Wiki, due at 11:59:59 p.m. on Wednesday, October 31Start writing: Second Paper, due at 11:59:59 p.m. on Monday, November 19 |
| Class 20, Monday, November 12 Liberalism and its Challengers Read Andric, Bridge on the Drina,
Chapter XI |
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Class 21, Wednesday, November 14 Read Achebe, Things Fall Apart,
Chapter 14 to end |
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Class 22, Monday, November 19 Read Gourevitch, We wish to
inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families,
"Chapter
4" Hand in: Second Paper by 11:59:59 p.m. |
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Class 23, Monday, November 26
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a
saint. Read Maria Carolina de Jesus, Child of the Dark,
See Blackboard
|
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Class 24, Wednesday, November 28 Read Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that
tomorrow we will be killed with our families,
Chapter
1 |
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Class 25, Monday, December 3 Read Luttwak, Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook,
What is the Coup d'Etat? |
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Class 26, Wednesday, December 5 Read Marty and Appleby, The Glory and the Power,
Chapter 1 Start writing: Final Paper, due at 11:59:59 p.m. on Wednesday, December 19 |
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Class 27, Monday, December 10 |
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Class 28, Wednesday, December 12 |
| Exam Period, Wednesday, December 19 Just Can't Get Enough... Hand in: Final Paper by 11:59:59 p.m. |