Contemporary Political Theory

The past hundred years have seen monumental and rapid socio-political changes around the world, which have transformed the way we live our lives. If we are to understand how we got to where we are, and ensure that we build just societies into the future, we need to grapple with the ideas and ideologies that continue to drive social, political, and economic change. This course invites students to do so, by surveying the central ideas and thinkers in contemporary normative (i.e., ethical or evaluative) political theory. The first half of the course looks at influential schools of political thought: authoritarianism and totalitarianism, Rawlsian liberalism, liberal-egalitarianism, libertarianism, and feminism. This will give students a firm theoretical foundation upon which to analyse and critique applied topics in contemporary politics during the second half of the course. These topics include: free speech, the design of fair voting systems, reparations, and the rights of nonhuman animals and the environment. Students are shown how to connect everyday political conversation with some of the leading ideas in political theory and, ideally, to tune their ear to conceptual incoherence and logical inconsistency in the former.