Inequality, Justice & History
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Despite thousands of years of evolution and refinement in the art of statecraft and governance, the formation, organisation, preservation, and optimisation of the political community (i.e. the body politic) remain the supreme challenge of civilised life. Indeed, archaic questions such as what is a political community, what are the ends and duties of a society, what constitutes a just and fair political order, and what are the rights and obligations of the citizen still resound with undiminished stridency to this day. In this course, we will attempt to tackle some of these hefty questions through the eyes of such prominent thinkers as Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose innovative treatises on social equality and political justice hold as much promise as they do problem. Just as important, we will consider how group psychology can affect and direct the (mis)carriage of political will and justice – occasionally even the restructuring of the social order – in the absence of rational agency or countervailing authority. Seeing how germane the upheavals of the French Revolution are to our reflections on inequality, justice, crowd psychology, and political reformation, the course will train its remaining attention on Charles Dickens’s masterful piece of historical fiction, A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Finally, to complete the tripartite theme of this term module, we will examine the metaphysics, hermeneutics, referentiality, appropriations, and misappropriations of history in the novelist’s retrospective reimagining of that watershed moment in European history. (To ensure positive learning outcomes, students will be assessed on their in-class presentations and end-of-term papers.)
PRIMARY READING TEXTS:
Aristotle. Politics. 2 nd Edn. Trans. with intro. by Carnes Lord. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Ed. with intro. by Andrew Sanders. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. with intro. by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: CUP, 2008.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004.
— Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract. Trans. with intro. by Christopher Betts. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Sanders, Andrew. Charles Dickens. Oxford: OUP, 2003.