Left Right Center

This course explores three of the dominant theoretical traditions in contemporary politics: liberalism, conservatism, and socialism. We will begin by reading classic historical statements of these traditions - the works of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith (liberalism), Edmund Burke (conservatism), and Karl Marx (socialism). We will consider what they stand for, and their attitudes towards reform and revolution. Afterwards, we will examine contemporary articulations of these traditions - modern liberalism, social democracy, the New Left, and libertarianism - and ask whether they should be considered part of the traditions they each purport to be a part of. To conclude, we will grapple with two broad perspectives which both claim, in drastically different ways, to transcend the divisions between left and right: the centrist `Third Way? and populism.

Throughout, we will investigate these different political theoretical perspectives by considering how they each respond to practical political problems. For instance, how do liberals, conservatives, and socialists understand the relationship between the individual and the state, as well as between the individual and society? How involved do they believe the state should be in the pursuit of distributive justice? Should the `left' focus on economics or identity politics (or both)? Does it still make sense to think in terms of `left' and `right'?

In other words, this course will deepen your understanding of the `left-right' spectrum, one of most ubiquitous frames of reference in popular political discourse - and ask you to think hard about whether it makes sense to think in terms of the spectrum at all.