Sections offered SPRING 2022:
#12222 |
STEVE RAHKO |
MW 4:45 PM–6:00 PM |
HU 111 |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
What is Liberal Democracy and what should we expect of it? What should Liberal Democracy require or expect of us? Liberal Democracy has been the most important political concept in the American cultural lexicon since the end of the Civil War, but, given the challenges of the 21st century, it may be more important than ever to consider what it means and what it can mean as a solution to the most basic needs of the human condition: community, self-fulfillment, human dignity, and material subsistence. In this course we will consider these as well as other questions toward a critical engagement with Liberal Democracy. By “critical engagement” I mean that we will explore some of the most influential and important statements made about Liberal Democracy in at least the past decade; consider what conceptual vocabularies may or may not be most crucial to our self-understanding of what Liberal Democracy means; and consider if the concept of Liberal Democracy is in crisis in the United States and around the world. In particular, we will consider these questions with regard to how the world has changed in the decade since the 2008 Financial Crisis, an event that has been linked to major social transformations across the world, including the rise of authoritarian populism, significant geopolitical events such as Brexit and the Arab Spring, and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency. In this course, students will be asked to entertain these questions and more as we survey, in Michel Foucault’s words, a “history of the present,” and consider what Liberal Democracy is and ought to be, whether it is in crisis in the United States, and what might be required to reform it and renew its possibilities in order for it to meet the challenges of the 21st century.