New Limited-Enrollment Courses

August 12, 2020

Students, the pre-registration period for Fall 2020 has already begun. Many professors have limited-enrollment procedures in place for seminar-style courses like Humanities Chair Bryan Garsten’s Demogoguery and Democracy. See below. 

A full list of Fall courses owned by Humanities (excluding cross-listed courses) may be found here

Course Description

Democracies have always produced popular leaders. What sorts of popular leadership do democracies need to function well, and what sorts pose a danger to them? When is a leader’s claim to speak for the people justified, and when is it a ploy to gain power? Can the special authority of a popular leader be made consistent with democracy’s principled commitment to equality? Can democratic principles be made effective without the special powers of gifted leaders? When does popular leadership threaten to devolve into tyranny? What is the relationship between demagoguery and populism?

This seminar will explore these and related questions as they arise in appropriate texts from the history of political thought, reflections on constitutional government, and literature. Starting with depictions of demagoguery in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Athens, the course then moves to Plato and Thomas Hobbes before turning to the efforts to tame demagoguery through constitutions in post-revolutionary United States and France. The final weeks of the course turn to distinctly modern aspects of democratic life, moving from Max Weber and Woodrow Wilson early in the twentieth-century to recent efforts to understand the effects of social media and populism early in the twenty-first century.

The course will accept up to fourteen students. Please apply for pre-registration through the political science department between August 7th and 12th. Students will be notified of their acceptance no later than August 14th. Admitted students should then confirm their attendance as soon as possible after the course selection period opens on August 17th. To access the PLSC 303/HUMS 302 pre-registration application, students must copy and paste this link: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=u76M3Tkh-E20EU4-h6vr…