This entirely new course will center on a close reading of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism but includes other readings as well. The course will be conducted from a pluralistic, open-minded perspective but remains open to any ideological lenses that students might bring, as long as students who bring specific ideological lenses remain open to other perspectives. We will seek simply to understand various historical eras that might illuminate our own times, without assuming that history can tell us what’s coming next or what we should do.
In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle recommends that we begin with what’s familiar. Rather than starting with Arendt and the 19th and early-mid 20th century scenarios that she analyzes, we will first read the early chapters of the Levitsky/Ziblatt book How Democracies Die (2018). That text canvasses authoritarian developments around the world and then looks specifically at the US scenario to ask whether this country faces a democratic and/or authoritarian crisis.
We proceed then to the centerpiece, Arendt’s 3-volume Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s a very dense, intense, and sometimes even quixotic book with many references to historical events, figures, and movements that you might not recognize. Part of this course’s experiment is to substitute, instead of reading additional pages of formal texts, your own research to explicate Arendt’s works. In other words, we’ll read fewer pages than I would otherwise assign in a political theory course, but we’ll do so with great care and with additional research. Please take notes in your books, research all figures/events that seem unfamiliar, and share via Slack what you find via that research, along with each week’s thoughts, reactions, insights, and questions. Feel free to link relevant news stories as well, and mention why you’re linking them. The Slack entries will form a significant part of your course grade.
I invite you to keep the present-day (and recent past) closely in mind when reading these texts. Levitsky/Ziblatt close their Introduction with the old saying that “history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” It’s not even clear that rhyming is an appropriate metaphor for how the past might inform the present, but we can talk about that together and discuss, through the semester, how the texts interact with our news intake and our sense of the world around us.
In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle recommends that we begin with what’s familiar. Rather than starting with Arendt and the 19th and early-mid 20th century scenarios that she analyzes, we will first read the early chapters of the Levitsky/Ziblatt book How Democracies Die (2018). That text canvasses authoritarian developments around the world and then looks specifically at the US scenario to ask whether this country faces a democratic and/or authoritarian crisis.
We proceed then to the centerpiece, Arendt’s 3-volume Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s a very dense, intense, and sometimes even quixotic book with many references to historical events, figures, and movements that you might not recognize. Part of this course’s experiment is to substitute, instead of reading additional pages of formal texts, your own research to explicate Arendt’s works. In other words, we’ll read fewer pages than I would otherwise assign in a political theory course, but we’ll do so with great care and with additional research. Please take notes in your books, research all figures/events that seem unfamiliar, and share via Slack what you find via that research, along with each week’s thoughts, reactions, insights, and questions. Feel free to link relevant news stories as well, and mention why you’re linking them. The Slack entries will form a significant part of your course grade.
I invite you to keep the present-day (and recent past) closely in mind when reading these texts. Levitsky/Ziblatt close their Introduction with the old saying that “history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” It’s not even clear that rhyming is an appropriate metaphor for how the past might inform the present, but we can talk about that together and discuss, through the semester, how the texts interact with our news intake and our sense of the world around us.
- Teacher: Benjamin Berger