Benjamin Gregg

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The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

Description

Drawing on primary sources, this seminar introduces social theory as the systematic investigation of social life: how society is organized, continually transforms itself, is sometimes beset by conflict, and is also affected by the behavior of its individual members.

Topics in classical theory include how individuals are tied to groups (Adam Smith), social equality in democratic societies (Tocqueville), how social structure influences knowledge (Marx), individuals as influenced by the social collective (Durkheim), society as influenced by individual actors (Weber), how social structure influences even intimate relationships (Simmel), mass deception and manipulation through modern culture (Horkheimer and Adorno), the integration of diverse spheres of any individual’s life as a project for society (Parsons), and the relationship between the individual’s purposes and the needs of society (Merton).

Topics in contemporary theory include how rituals bind us together (Collins), the nature of social cooperation and trust (Cook, Hardin, Levi), power and inequality (Tilly), the social consequences of economic structure (Granovetter), the phenomenon of racial difference (Patterson), the politics of sexual difference (Smith), the peculiar quality of our Western modernity (Elias; Giddens), the transformation of the nation state (Sassen), the modern scholar (with implications for the modern student, i.e., you) (Bourdieu), and the dangers of economic and bureaucratic imperatives (Habermas). Each session combines lecture as well as student-centered, student-initiated discussion.

REQUIRED TEXTS

Classical Sociological Theory, 3rd ed. 2012, and Contemporary Sociological Theory, both 3rd ed. 2012. Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell ● “Value Package” for both volumes combined: ISBN 9781118438725

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Attendance: Required. A student's course grade decreases by one-half letter grade for each unexcused absence beyond four absences that need no excuse (students remain responsible for everything said in all lectures). Attendance is taken only once each class period. A student is present if he or she responds when I call his or her name during roll call. The relevant category is present/absent not on-time/late.

Evaluation: The final grade is the average of the grades of four essays (adjusted for class participation, as warranted), each 4 to 5 pages in length. No late essays accepted. Grades: A = 4.00, A-= 3.67, B+ = 3.33, B = 3.00, B-= 2.67, C+ = 2.33, C = 2.00, C-= 1.67, D+= 1.33, D = 1.00, D-= 0.67, F = 0.00. Pluses or minuses, as warranted.

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

COURSE: GOV 335Q-on demand

INSTRUCTOR: Benjamin Gregg

SEMESTER: 2020, first summer session

TITLE: Global Justice

FLAG: Writing

FORMAT: Pre-recorded set of fourteen lectures, one for each of the assigned readings, and available on demand; opportunities for questions and group discussion via Zoom; fixed deadlines for submitting each of the three required essays; fixed deadlines for submitting brief, initial responses to each of the readings (for student-centered difficult dialogues on each topic). All submissions via Canvas.

INSTRUCTOR AVAILABILITY: Instructor will respond to email within 24 hours, any day of the week, throughout the first summer session; one-on-one Zoom meetings always possible on request.

BRIEF COURSE DESCRIPTION: Offers an overview of the important contributions to core issues of global justice today, including sovereignty, group right to self-determination, nationalism and patriotism, global poverty and international distributive justice, the social and legal status of women in different cultures, terrorism, and human rights. Careful, constructive, line-by-line feedback on student writing.

DETAILED COURSE DESCRIPTION: We study seven core issues of global justice by analyzing pairs of competing essays, one pair each on sovereignty (Is justice possible outside and among nation states?); group right to self-determination (Is it right that some few peoples, but not the vast majority of peoples, enjoy the right to a sovereign political community?); nationalism and patriotism (Is it morally wrong to privilege our compatriots over foreigners?); global poverty and international distributive justice (Are citizens of rich countries such as the USA immoral or unjust if they decline to transfer of some of their national wealth to poor countries?); the social and legal status of women in different cultures (Should there be universal norms for gender equality across all cultures or is that idea culturally imperialistic toward some cultures?); terrorism (Can a minority group without a military force justifiably target non-combatant members of the majority when the majority perpetrates genocide or ethnic cleansing against the minority?); and human rights (If human rights cannot be anything but the particular values and commitments of particular cultures, are human rights just one more exercise in “might makes right”: human rights as power politics of powerful nations?). The seminar requires the close reading and careful analysis of assigned texts; active participation in student-centered, difficult dialogues on each of our seven issues, conducted asynchronously on Canvas; and the composition of three essays, each critical, analytic, thesis-driven, and itself a difficult dialogue.

REQUIRED TEXT: The Global Justice Reader, ed. Thom Brooks (Blackwell Publishing, 2008) [inexpensive used copies may be purchased on-line]

EVALUATION: A student’s final grade will be the average of three 4- to 5-page essays, adjusted for quality of participation in student-centered dialogues conducted on Canvas; students may revise the writing and content of either their first or second essay for a higher grade on that essay. All essays are to be uploaded to the seminar’s Canvas site.

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory

DESCRIPTION

Drawing on primary sources, this seminar introduces social theory as the systematic investigation of social life: how society is organized, continually transforms itself, is sometimes beset by conflict, and is also affected by the behavior of its individual members. Topics in classical theory include how individuals are tied to groups (Adam Smith), social equality in democratic societies (Tocqueville), how social structure influences knowledge (Marx), individuals as influenced by the social collective (Durkheim), society as influenced by individual actors (Weber), how social structure influences even intimate relationships (Simmel), mass deception and manipulation through modern culture (Horkheimer and Adorno), the integration of diverse spheres of any individual’s life as a project for society (Parsons), and the relationship between the individual’s purposes and the needs of society (Merton). Topics in contemporary theory include how rituals bind us together (Collins), the nature of social cooperation and trust (Cook, Hardin, Levi), power and inequality (Tilly), the social consequences of economic structure (Granovetter), the phenomenon of racial difference (Patterson), the politics of sexual difference (Smith), the peculiar quality of our Western modernity (Elias; Giddens), the transformation of the nation state (Sassen), the modern scholar (with implications for the contemporary Plan II student) (Bourdieu), and the dangers of economic and bureaucratic imperatives (Habermas).

REQUIRED TEXTS

Classical Sociological Theory, 3^rd ed. 2012. Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

Contemporary Sociological Theory, 3^rd ed. 2012. Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

EVALUATION

Average of four 5-page essays, adjusted for class participation

INSTRUCTOR BIO

Benjamin Gregg (B.A. Yale University, Ph.D. Princeton University Ph.D., D. Phil. Free University of Berlin) teaches political and social theory, informed by political science and sociology, in UT’s Department of Government but also in Germany, Japan, China, Austria and (in 2019) Brazil. Two of his books, Thick Moralities, Thin Politics (2003) and Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms (2003), confront challenges of social justice in complex modern societies, especially in liberal democratic states. Another two books, Human Rights as Social Construction (2012) and The Human Rights State (2016), analyze problems and prospects for justice across national borders. He is currently writing a book (now under review at Oxford University Press) titled Human Nature as Cultural Design: The Political Challenges of Genetic Enhancement and has presented aspects of this project at invited lectures in the USA, Europe, Asia, and South America, as well as at international conferences, on the radio, and in newspaper interviews. Recent research visits to further this project include a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Linz, Austria, and visiting scholar positions at The Hastings Institute (Garrison, NY), the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and, for all of 2018, at the University of Oxford (at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and at the Ethox Centre, Nuffield Department of Population Health).

We examine constitutional law, American political culture, and the sociology of rules by focusing on a problem central to our legal regime: the indeterminacy of some legal rules, constitutional rules in particular. The term legal indeterminacy refers to the lack of determinate knowledge: knowledge of what a legal rule means and of how judges and others should apply it. Where law is indeterminate, no theory, rule, or principle constrains a judge to interpret or apply a law in a particular way. Consequently a case could have several different answers, yet all of them equally valid. While few scholars or judges today view law itself as something static, the notion that judges make rather than find law implies, to many observers, consequences such as unequal or arbitrary treatment of individuals. Where law is determinate, however, it may have an exclusively correct meaning and proper application, in short, one right answer. If justice through law is predicated on such qualities as consistency and even objectivity, then determinacy, in one form or another, might seem to be a prerequisite for justice. And yet, as this course will demonstrate, much law at the constitutional level is indeterminate. This course explores how the Supreme Court has coped with this phenomenon presenting both problems for justice and opportunities for justice over two centuries in five major areas: property, privacy, equal protection, expression, and religion.

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

Title: Classics of Social Scientific Thought: Human Nature and Political Community

Semester: Spring 2019

Professor: Benjamin Gregg

Requested time/venue: Tu/Th 3:30-5 pm in CLA 1.108 (or elsewhere is CLA, if

possible; prefer Greek-style lecture hall)

Description: This seminar explores a range of responses to a fundamental question of political theory: What is human nature? (Indeed: Is there a human nature?) It examines the respective accounts of four of the greatest philosophical thinkers of Western civilization: from the classical era, we read Plato (Republic, ca. 380 BCE; Symposium, ca. 385-370 BCE) and Augustine (Confessions, ca. 397-400; City of God, ca. 400); from the modern era, Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1755). In its second half, the seminar studies two major contributions in evolutionary psychology. Steven Pinker and David Buss articulate the major claims of contemporary evolutionary psychology: that human nature “was designed” by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch (from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago) and that our psychological adaptations “were designed” tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This approach implies a distinct vision for the organization of political community, informed as it is by a conception of human nature. David Buller claims by contrast that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene but, like the immune system, are continually adapting over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. His argument entails a very different vision for the organization of political community, informed by the rejection of the very idea of human nature. As we read our authors and compare and contrast them with each other, we are guided by a second question: What does each of these theories suggest with regard to how a just political community might best be organized and, in particular, how justice might be conceived and pursued today in light of what we have learned from our authors?

Grading Policy: The course grade is the average of three essays, each responding to the student’s choice from a list of prompts, and adjusted for the quality of the student’s in-class participation

Required texts: selections from each of the following:

Plato: The Republic

Plato: Symposium

Augustine: City of God

Augustine: Confessions

Hobbes: Leviathan

Rousseau: First and Second Discourses

Steven Pinker, The Blank State: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)

David Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for       Human Nature (2005)

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory

DESCRIPTION

Drawing on primary sources, this seminar introduces social theory as the systematic investigation of social life: how society is organized, continually transforms itself, is sometimes beset by conflict, and is also affected by the behavior of its individual members. Topics in classical theory include how individuals are tied to groups (Adam Smith), social equality in democratic societies (Tocqueville), how social structure influences knowledge (Marx), individuals as influenced by the social collective (Durkheim), society as influenced by individual actors (Weber), how social structure influences even intimate relationships (Simmel), mass deception and manipulation through modern culture (Horkheimer and Adorno), the integration of diverse spheres of any individual’s life as a project for society (Parsons), and the relationship between the individual’s purposes and the needs of society (Merton). Topics in contemporary theory include how rituals bind us together (Collins), the nature of social cooperation and trust (Cook, Hardin, Levi), power and inequality (Tilly), the social consequences of economic structure (Granovetter), the phenomenon of racial difference (Patterson), the politics of sexual difference (Smith), the peculiar quality of our Western modernity (Elias; Giddens), the transformation of the nation state (Sassen), the modern scholar (with implications for the contemporary Plan II student) (Bourdieu), and the dangers of economic and bureaucratic imperatives (Habermas).

REQUIRED TEXTS

Classical Sociological Theory, 3^rd ed. 2012. Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

Contemporary Sociological Theory, 3^rd ed. 2012. Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

EVALUATION

Average of four 5-page essays, adjusted for class participation

INSTRUCTOR BIO

Benjamin Gregg (B.A. Yale University, Ph.D. Princeton University Ph.D., D. Phil. Free University of Berlin) teaches political and social theory, informed by political science and sociology, in UT’s Department of Government but also in Germany, Japan, China, Austria and (in 2019) Brazil. Two of his books, Thick Moralities, Thin Politics (2003) and Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms (2003), confront challenges of social justice in complex modern societies, especially in liberal democratic states. Another two books, Human Rights as Social Construction (2012) and The Human Rights State (2016), analyze problems and prospects for justice across national borders. He is currently writing a book (now under review at Oxford University Press) titled Human Nature as Cultural Design: The Political Challenges of Genetic Enhancement and has presented aspects of this project at invited lectures in the USA, Europe, Asia, and South America, as well as at international conferences, on the radio, and in newspaper interviews. Recent research visits to further this project include a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Linz, Austria, and visiting scholar positions at The Hastings Institute (Garrison, NY), the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and, for all of 2018, at the University of Oxford (at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and at the Ethox Centre, Nuffield Department of Population Health).

INSTRUCTOR: Benjamin Gregg

COURSE: GOV f335M

SEMESTER: Summer 2018, first session

UNIQUE: tba

MEETS: MTuWThF 8:30-10 am

VENUE: MEZ 2.118

TITLE: Global Justice

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Our seminar provides an overview of major scholarly contributions to the analysis of core issues of global justice today: sovereignty (are nation states in a state of nature?); group right to self-determination (which peoples deserve it?); nationalism and patriotism (should we privilege our compatriots over foreigners?); global poverty and international distributive justice (should rich countries transfer wealth to poor countries?); the social and legal status of women in different cultures (should there be universal norms for the treatment of women across all cultures?); terrorism (is it ever acceptable as a means to fight terrorism?), just war (are preemptive strikes ever warranted?); and human rights (should a right to be free of torture be absolute?). The seminar requires the close reading and careful analysis of assigned texts; active participation in student-centered classroom debates on each issue; and the composition of three essays, each critical, analytic, and thesis-driven.

EVALUATION: A student’s course grade is the average of three essays, adjusted for quality of in-class participation, including regular Canvas posts about the assigned readings.

REQUIRED BOOK: The Global Justice Reader, ed. T. Brooks (2008)

INSTRUCTOR: Benjamin Gregg

GOV 335M

TITLE: Global Justice

Unique: 38693

Meets Tu/Th in BEN 1.102

DESCRIPTION: Offers an overview of the important contributions to core issues of global justice today, including sovereignty, rights to self-determination, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, global poverty and international distributive justice, the social and legal status of women, terrorism, and human rights.

REQUIRED TEXT: The Global Justice Reader, ed. Thom Brooks (Blackwell Publishing, 2008)

EVALUATION: A student’s final grade will be the average of three essays, adjusted significantly for quality of in-class participation.

Writing flag.

SEMESTER: Fall 2017

INSTRUCTOR: Benjamin Gregg

COURSE: GOV 382K, 3 hour seminar

TITLE: “STUDIES IN POLITICAL THEORY & PHILOSOPHY”

(Topic: Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza: What is the Political?)

TIME & VENUE: TH 7-10pm, BAT 1.104

DESCRIPTION

This course provides a pointed introduction to the broad and heterogeneous field of Political Theory, focusing on the three major authors of Western thought, by analyzing different and historically influential answers to the question, “What is the political?” One answer comes from classical Greek thought, another from the seventeenth century, and a third from the eighteenth. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) understands politics as teleological; Spinoza (1632-1677), as both theological and philosophical; and Kant (1724-1804), as a product of human reason. While offering distinct approaches to political theory, and diverse strategies in writing philosophical texts, each author demonstrates in his own way the enduring relevance of his own approach to an array of political questions and answers. We read these texts are in dialogue with each other and explore how these slivers of Western civilization cohere even in their diversity.

REQUIRED TEXTS

Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) Ed. R. Crisp, trans. R. Crisp, 2014. ISBN 978-1-107-61223-5

Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) Ed. J. Israel, trans. M. Silverthorne and J. Israel, 2012. ISBN 0-531-53097-0

Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) Ed. M. Gregor and J. Timmermann, trans. M. Gregor, 2012. ISBN 978-1-107-40106-8

EVALUATION

Course grade based on regular attendance and well-prepared participation as well as one 2-page paper for each session, to be submitted to our Canvas website every week, 24 hours before class. Each week these papers will generate points of departure for in-class analysis. Seriatim each student will be responsible for writing a short summary of a class discussion, to be presented at the beginning of the following session.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: When we, as individuals and as members of various groups, construct our own “sense of self,” we might think we are in control of ourselves. When other people, and institutions and forces beyond them, define us, we might think we are being controlled, as individuals as well as members of various groups. The problem of whether and to what extent we humans are in control, or can be in control, of ourselves – of our identities but also of our behavior and understanding, both public and private – is what in this course I refer to as the “problem of the subject.” The problem of the subject is the never completed social task of constructing intersubjectively valid understandings of fundamental human identity. For example, are human beings moved by social, emotional, and psychological forces beyond their control or can they control themselves and their environment through the power of their own reasoning? This seminar explores different answers to this question by analyzing seminal works of European and American thinkers of the late modern and contemporary eras, works that have powerfully influenced our notions of the subject today.

The European Enlightenment of the 18th century gave rise to master narratives of the subject as a sovereign figure capable of rational control of his or her worlds. We begin with the “modern, enlightenment self” (Kant, Rousseau, andMarx), taken as an individual, then examine the “solidary self” (Durkheim and Mauss), or the self as a communal member. Next we turn to the “modern self fragmented” (Kierkegaard, Simmel, and Weber), whether for better or worse. Then we examine the “interior self” (Freud), and subsequently the “self as the other of the socially dominant one,” with one examples from sex (de Beauvoir) and one from “race” (Du Bois). Finally we discuss the “symbolically or strategically interacting self” (Mead and Goffman). In lectures introducing each author, I will develop the specific conception of social science offered by each of our authors. The last hour of each session will be devoted to student-organized and student–led discussion among students, in this student-centered seminar.

EVALUATION: The final grade is the average of the grades of four essays, each 5 to 6 pages in length. For each assignment, I provide a list of topics from which students choose one (students may also develop their own topic). Students may modify the topic chosen in ways that suit the logic of their essay’s argument. Each essay should develop original insights about our authors, in the student’s own and unique voice.

REQUIRED BOOKS: [1] W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, [2] Søren Kierkegaard. Either/Or, [3] Max Weber, From Max Weber, [4] Marcel Mauss, The Gift, [5] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, [6]George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, [7] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, [8] Erving Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

TEXTS AVAILABLE ON CANVAS: [1] Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, [2] Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” [3] Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,” [4] Émile Durkheim, “Forms of Social Solidarity,” [5] Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and “The Stranger”

INSTRUCTOR BIO:

Benjamin Gregg (B.A. Yale University, Ph.D. Princeton University) teaches political and social theory, informed by political science and sociology, in UT’s Government Department but also in Germany, Japan, China and Austria. Two of his books, Thick Moralities, Thin Politics (2003) and Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms (2003), confront challenges of social justice in complex modern societies, especially in liberal democratic states. Another two books, Human Rights as Social Construction (2012) and The Human Rights State (2016), analyze problems and prospects for justice across national borders. His current book-in-progress, Human Nature as Cultural Design: The Political Challenge of Genetic Enhancement, explores core issues in bioethics: rapid advances in genetic engineering, particularly of human embryos and fetuses, pose difficult social, political, moral, and legal questions that challenge a range of different conceptions of a just society. His current research was supported by a College of Liberal Arts Humanities Research Award, 2014-2016;a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Linz, Austria, Spring 2016; by Visiting Scholar positions at The Hastings Center (Garrison, NY) and the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Summer 2016; and as a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, Spring and Fall 2018. In 2016 he delivered invited lectures on this project in Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Spain, Austria, and the USA. In 2017 he will lecture in Brazil.

Course Description

INSTRUCTOR: Benjamin Gregg

COURSE: GOV f335M

SEMESTER: Summer 2017, first session

UNIQUE: 83022

MEETS: MTuWThF 11:30-1:00 pm

VENUE: CLA 0.102

TITLE: Global Justice

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar provides an introduction and overview of core issues of global justice today: a people’s right to self-determination; limits on national sovereignty; nationalism versus cosmopolitanism; global poverty and distributive justice; the social and legal status of women in different cultures; just and unjust war; torture as a means to combat terrorism; and human rights. For each issue, we read two compelling analyses, each challenging the other. Students then debate the strengths and weaknesses of the two competing positions and draw their own conclusions. Essay topics are based on these debates.

EVALUATION: A student’s course grade is the average of three essays, each four to six pages.

REQUIRED BOOK: The Global Justice Reader, ed. T. Brooks (2008)

This seminar examines one of the most important and historically consequential contributors to the European Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). His political theory influenced the French elite that guided the French Revolution as well as the colonial elite that guided the American Revolution. Some of his work championed deeply modernist forms of subjectivity and introspection. In his writings he advocated the education of the whole person for citizenship. As a novelist, he contributed to the genre of the sentimental novel that encouraged the idea of human rights.

Our seminar begins with one of Rousseau’s central questions: For all of its obvious benefits, Western modernity has created at least as many problems as it has solved (the First and Second Discourses). We first examine Rousseau’s political answer (On the Social Contract), then his pedagogical response (Emile or On Education), and finally his “post-political” response (The Reveries of the Solitary Walker).

Texts to be purchased (to coordinate our work in seminar, please purchase these particular ISBNs): 

▪ First and Second Discourses. 1964 [1750; 1754]. St. Martin’s. ISBN 978-0-312-694401

▪ On the Social Contract.1978 [1756/1762]. St. Martin’s. ISBN 978-0-312-694463

▪ Emile or On Education .1979 [1762]. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-019311

▪ The Reveries of the Solitary Walker.1979 [1782] Penguin. ISBN 9780140443639

When we, as individuals and as members of various groups, construct our own “sense of self,” we might think we are in control of ourselves. When other people, and institutions and forces beyond them, define us, we might think we are being controlled, as individuals as well as members of various groups. The problem of whether and to what extent we humans are in control, or can be in control, of ourselves – of our identities but also of our behavior and understanding, both public and private – is what in this course I refer to as the “problem of the subject.” The problem of the subject is the never completed social task of constructing intersubjectively valid understandings of fundamental human identity. For example, are human beings moved by social, emotional, and psychological forces beyond their control or can they control themselves and their environment through the power of their own reasoning? This seminar explores different answers to this question by analyzing seminal works of European and American thinkers of the late modern and contemporary eras, works that have powerfully influenced our notions of the subject today.

The European Enlightenment of the 18th century gave rise to master narratives of the subject as a sovereign figure capable of rational control of his or her worlds. We begin with the “modern, enlightenment self” (Kant, Rousseau, and Marx), taken as an individual, then examine the “solidary self” (Tönnies, Durkheim, and Mauss), or the self as a communal member. Next we turn to the “modern self fragmented” (Kierkegaard, Simmel, and Weber), whether for better or worse. Then we examine the “interior self” (Freud), and subsequently the “self as the other of the socially dominant one,” with one examples from sex (de Beauvoir) and one from “race” (Du Bois). Finally we discuss the “symbolically or strategically interacting self” (Mead and Goffman). In lectures introducing each author, I will develop the specific conception of social science offered by each of our authors. The last hour of each session will be devoted to student-organized and –led discussion among students, in this student-centered seminar.

Required Books

[1] W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, [2] Søren Kierkegaard. Either/Or, [3] Max Weber, From Max Weber, [4] Marcel Mauss, The Gift, [5] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, [6]George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, [7] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, [8] Erving Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

TEXTS available as pdf-files on our Canvas site

[1] Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, [2] Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” [3] Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,” [4] Émile Durkheim, “Forms of Social Solidarity,” [5] Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and “The Stranger”

About the Professor:
Benjamin Gregg teaches social and political theory informed by political science and sociology, not only at UT but also in Germany, Japan, Austria, and China. Two books, Thick Moralities, Thin Politics (2003) and Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms (2003), confront challenges of social justice in complex modern societies, especially in liberal democratic states. Another two books, Human Rights as Social Construction (2012) and The Human Rights State (2016), analyze problems and prospects for justice across national borders. Current book-in-progress, Human Nature as Cultural Design: The Political Challenge of Genetic Enhancement, explores core issues in bioethics. Rapid advances in genetic engineering, particularly of human embryos and fetuses, pose difficult social, political, moral, and legal questions that challenge a range of different conceptions of a just society.

We examine constitutional law, American political culture, and the sociology of rules by focusing on a problem central to our legal regime: the “indeterminacy” of some legal rules, constitutional rules in particular. The term legal indeterminacy refers to the lack of determinate knowledge: knowledge of what a legal rule means and of how judges and others should apply it. Where law is indeterminate, no theory, rule, or principle constrains a judge to interpret or apply a law in a particular way. Consequently a case could have several different answers, yet all of them equally valid. While few scholars or judges today view law itself as something static, the notion that judges make rather than find law implies, to many observers, consequences such as unequal or arbitrary treatment of individuals. Where law is determinate, however, it may have an exclusively “correct” meaning and “proper” application, in short, one “right” answer. If justice through law is predicated on such qualities as consistency and even objectivity, then determinacy, in one form or another, might seem to be a prerequisite for justice. And yet, as this course will demonstrate, much law at the constitutional level is indeterminate. This course explores how the Supreme Court has coped with this phenomenon —— presenting both problems for justice and opportunities for justice —— over two centuries in five major areas: property, privacy, equal protection, expression, and religion.

Interdisciplinary Content: Our course draws on political science, sociology, philosophy, history, jurisprudence, and on the history of Supreme Court decisions.

Contemporary Content: This course examines the development of contemporary legal regulation of property, privacy, equal protection, expression, and religion in the United States by analysis of decisions across the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first. This analysis will enable students to make thoughtful, informed opinions about the possible future course of constitutional interpretation at least in the near term.

Evaluation: The final grade has two components: each student writes five in-class essays; and each student briefs in-class multiple times. Each essay counts for 20% of the final grade, adjusted (potentially significantly) for the quality of the student’s briefs and participation in both lecture and in discussion section.

In-Class Briefs: The course grade of a student who fails to brief a case to which he or she has been assigned will be reduced by one full letter grade for each such failure, unless that failure is due to a health condition or other serious matter documented within 48 hours of the missed brief by a written explanation from a physician or other relevant person.

Writing and Information Literacy: Toward helping students improve writing and information literacy in the context of in-class essays, teaching assistants will discuss before and after each assignment aspects of careful, critical, thoughtful analysis of written sources (in our casebook) that take competing positions on core issues of the seminar. Students will learn how to defend a clear thesis with good arguments via discursive reasoning and by drawing on written sources.

Text: Kathleen Sullivan & Noah Feldman, eds.: Constitutional Law, 19th edition (2016): ISBN 978-1-63459-447-9

A core element of European identity is the notion of freedom in two forms that developed in the modern era: freedom as (a) the individual’s self-determination within his or her private sphere and personal life and (b) the community’s self-determination as a public achievement of private citizens come together to deliberate and decide matters of the res publica. In theory and history, the realization of such freedom has always been fraught with difficulty. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right offers one of the most compelling diagnoses of the ills of modern Western political community with respect to these two freedoms. It also develops some of the most influential standards by which to judge the civil society that undergirds modern European political community and its claims to provide these two freedoms.

Required Texts

G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967; ISBN 978-0195002768) ▪ Or in the original language: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986)

Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) ▪ Or in the original language: Leiden an Unbestimmtheit. Eine Reaktualisierung der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2001)

We examine constitutional law, American political culture, and the sociology of rules by focusing on a problem central to our legal regime: the “indeterminacy” of some legal rules, constitutional rules in particular. The term legal indeterminacy refers to the lack of determinate knowledge: knowledge of what a legal rule means and of how judges and others should apply it. Where law is indeterminate, no theory, rule, or principle constrains a judge to interpret or apply a law in a particular way. Consequently a case could have several different answers, yet all of them equally valid. While few scholars or judges today view law itself as something static, the notion that judges make rather than find law implies, to many observers, consequences such as unequal or arbitrary treatment of individuals. Where law is determinate, however, it may have an exclusively “correct” meaning and “proper” application, in short, one “right” answer. If justice through law is predicated on such qualities as consistency and even objectivity, then determinacy, in one form or another, might seem to be a prerequisite for justice. And yet, as this course will demonstrate, much law at the constitutional level is indeterminate. This course explores how the Supreme Court has coped with this phenomenon —— presenting both problems for justice and opportunities for justice —— over two centuries in five major areas: property, privacy, equal protection, expression, and religion.

Interdisciplinary Content: Our course draws on political science, sociology, philosophy, history, jurisprudence, and on the history of Supreme Court decisions.

Contemporary Content: This course examines the development of contemporary legal regulation of property, privacy, equal protection, expression, and religion in the United States by analysis of decisions across the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first. This analysis will enable students to make thoughtful, informed opinions about the possible future course of constitutional interpretation at least in the near term.

Evaluation: The final grade has two components: each student writes five in-class essays; and each student briefs in-class multiple times. Each essay counts for 20% of the final grade, adjusted (potentially significantly) for the quality of the student’s briefs and participation in both lecture and in discussion section.

In-Class Briefs: The course grade of a student who fails to brief a case to which he or she has been assigned will be reduced by one full letter grade for each such failure, unless that failure is due to a health condition or other serious matter documented within 48 hours of the missed brief by a written explanation from a physician or other relevant person.

Writing and Information Literacy: Toward helping students improve writing and information literacy in the context of in-class essays, teaching assistants will discuss before and after each assignment aspects of careful, critical, thoughtful analysis of written sources (in our casebook) that take competing positions on core issues of the seminar. Students will learn how to defend a clear thesis with good arguments via discursive reasoning and by drawing on written sources.

Text: Kathleen Sullivan & Noah Feldman, eds.: Constitutional Law, 19th edition (2016): ISBN 978-1-63459-447-9

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

Summer 2015

INSTRUCTOR: Benjamin Gregg

GOV S335M

TITLE: Global Justice

Meets MTuWThF 8:30-10 in MEZ 2.124

DESCRIPTION: This seminar offers an overview of some of the most important writings on core issues of global justice today, including sovereignty, rights to self-determination, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, global poverty and international distributive justice, the social and legal status of women, terrorism, and human rights.

REQUIRED TEXT: The Global Justice Reader, ed. Thom Brooks (Blackwell Publishing, 2008)

EVALUATION: A student’s final grade will be the average of three essays, adjusted significantly for quality of in-class participation.

TITLE: “Human Rights: Theories and Practices”

Prerequisites

None

Course Description

This seminar provides a basic introduction to human rights by exploring competing answers to such questions as: What is the idea of human rights? Who are the “humans” of human rights? In a state-centric world, how do human rights relate to the nation-state and beyond any state? How are human rights related to the history of European empire and commerce? How are human rights related to the European Enlightenment? How are human rights related to global poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment? What roles do international instruments play -- or fail to play? How are human rights related to non-European cultures, such as various East Asian and African cultures? The seminar will also consider alternative approaches to understanding and advancing human rights, including human rights as political not theological; generating universal human rights out of local norms; individuals as authors of human rights; translating human rights into local cultural vernaculars; and advancing human rights through cognitive reframing.

Grading Policy

Average of four essays (each 5 pages), adjusted for quality of in-class participation

Required Text

Benjamin Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction (Cambridge University Press, 2012), paperback (ISBN: 9781107612945)

Flag: Writing

INSTRUCTOR: Benjamin Gregg

COURSE: SS 301

SEMESTER: Fall 2014

MEETS: TTH 11:00 am - 12:30 pm

TITLE: Honors Social Science

FLAG: Writing

DESCRIPTION

Drawing on primary sources, this seminar introduces social theory as the systematic investigation of social life: how it is organized, continually transforms itself, is challenged by problems and conflicts, and is influenced by the behavior of groups and individuals. Topics in classical theory include social equality in democratic societies (Tocqueville), how social structure influences knowledge (Marx), individuals as influenced by the social collective (Durkheim), society as influenced by individual actors (Weber), how social structure influences even intimate relationships (Simmel), mass deception and manipulation through modern culture (Horkheimer and Adorno), and the relationship between the individual’s purposes and the needs of society (Merton). Contemporary topics include how rituals bind us together (Collins), the nature of social cooperation and trust (Cook, Hardin, Levi), the social consequences of economic structure (Granovetter), the phenomenon of racial difference (Patterson), power and inequality (Giddens), and the coming transformation of the nation state (Sassen).

REQUIRED TEXTS

Classical Sociological Theory, 3rd ed. (2012). Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

Contemporary Sociological Theory, 3rd ed. (2012). Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

EVALUATION

Average of four 5-page essays, adjusted for quality of class participation

ABOUT THE PROFESSOR

Professor Gregg, who grew up in Berkeley, California, is a social and political theorist with a BA from Yale, a PhD from Princeton (in political science), and a PhD from the Free University of Berlin (in Philosophy). He is the author of Human Rights as Social Construction; Thick Moralities, Thin Politics: Social Integration across Communities of Belief; and Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism. This year he published The Human Rights State and is now at work on his fifth book, Second Nature: The Genetic Self-Transformation of the Human Species, his second for Cambridge University Press. His research is supported by a three-year Humanities Research Award that will take him to Princeton, Harvard, and Case Western Reserve University; in Germany, to the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics and to the University of Göttingen; and in Singapore, to the Genome Institute (Biopolis Biomedical City) and National University. In his spare time he patiently pursues a long-term project that draws on files of East German dissidents monitored by the secret police (“Stasi”) until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These books and current projects all deploy classical and contemporary sociological theory to solve problems that otherwise confound political philosophy. He has taught at universities in Germany, Austria, China and Japan. The College of Liberal Arts Committees on Research and Teaching awarded him the Silver Spurs Fellowship in recognition of outstanding scholarship and teaching. He is partial to theater and hopes someday to become a playwright.

DESCRIPTION

A core element of European identity is the notion of freedom in two forms that developed in the modern era: freedom as (a) the individual’s self-determination within his or her private sphere and personal life and (b) the community’s self-determination as a public achievement of private citizens come together to deliberate and decide matters of the res publica. In theory and history, the realization of such freedom has always been fraught with difficulty. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right offers one of the most compelling diagnoses of the ills of modern Western political community with respect to these two freedoms. It also develops some of the most influential standards by which to judge the civil society that undergirds modern European political community and its claims to provide these two freedoms.

REQUIRED TEXTS

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)

EVALUATION

The final grade will be the average of three essays, each five to six pages, adjusted for quality of class participation, as well as brief, twice-weekly threads to weekly fora on Blackboard.

Flags: Global cultures; ethics and leadership; writing.

DESCRIPTION

Few countries will figure more prominently in America’s future than China. Already an economic powerhouse, China is rapidly emerging as a great power and potential geopolitical rival to the USA. Not surprisingly, China’s rapid rise has generated considerable debate in the United States over how to respond. Should Washington seek to “balance” Chinese power or, alternatively, look for ways to integrate China more fully into international society? At the heart of this debate are conflicting judgments about China’s intentions and capabilities, as well as America’s goals and power. In this respect the present debate is similar to the Cold War debates about how Washington should deal with China. In the early 1950s, Washington sought to contain and isolate China. In the 1970s, the US reversed course and looked for ways to strengthen its ties to the Middle Kingdom. Many of the choices and trade-offs that Washington weighed in the past are in play once again. They are the focus of this course. This is primarily a course about the sources of American foreign policy toward China. But we will also consider how Chinese leaders view the United States and explore issues of particular concern to Washington and Beijing today (such as Taiwan). In addition, field trips in Beijing and Shanghai offer students a phenomenological appreciation of some of the changes afoot in contemporary China: economic, political, and social. Finally, supplementary classes on Chinese history and society, as well as on basic aspects of the Chinese language, will enhance students’ study of relations between our country and China.

REQUIRED TEXTS

? James Fallows, Postcards From Tomorrow Square (Vintage, 2009)

? Mark Leonard, What Does China Think (Public Affairs, 2008)

? James Mann, About Face (Vintage, 2000)

? Susan Shirk, The Fragile Superpower (Oxford, 2007)

EVALUATION

Students must complete all readings listed on the syllabus, attend all course sessions without exception, and participate in all field trips. A student’s final grade will be the average of two essays, each five to six double-spaced pages, adjusted for quality of class participation. Both essays must be submitted in class, on time. Due dates to be announced.

DESCRIPTION

Technological developments in the genetic manipulation of the human embryo poses pressing questions about possible rights that American law will need to address. The unprecedented nature of these questions, and the potential for conflicting rights-claims, mark one difficulty of the task. For example, should parents have a legal right to determine what, in their opinion, will be the “best” genetic inheritance for the lives of their children? Or does a person not yet born (if that is even the legally apposite designation) have a legal right to be free of irreversible genetic enhancement desired by his or her parents? Indeed, is choice (of parents, of unborn life) even the best way to conceptualize the issue rather than, say, as risk (to health, the environment), as property rights (of the parents of an embryo, of the embryo to its DNA), or as legal personhood (at various stages of biological development prior to an unmistakable human being)? The seminar addresses some of the key non-legal questions that might provide a basis for a future jurisprudence of genetic enhancement. And it examines possible starting points in extant case law.

ASSIGNED READINGS: Packet available from a local copy-shop

EVALUATION: Course grade based on regular attendance, well-prepared participation, and one 2-page paper written for each session, to be submitted to our Blackboard website every Sunday by 6 pm. Each week these papers will generate points of departure for in-class analysis.

Course Description

An introduction to the development of classical social scientific thought as an Enlightenment project. We begin with appropriate sections of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1772). Then we examine a key philosophical source of the preoccupation in classical social thought with the individual’s motivation in society, and conflicted motivation in particular: here we read Søren Kierkegaard (1844); then to one of first great social theorists whose project marries the ambitions of the Encyclopédie with the modernist anxieties of Kierkegaard: Karl Marx (1844). Next we study a different version of that project, born of the same marriage but with different presuppositions: the anxieties of modern rationality, as detailed by Max Weber (1904). We turn then to the abiding concern with the need for highly motivated social cooperation and solidarity, yet no longer possible in the various pre-modern forms: Émile Durkheim (1893). We return to our earlier exploration of individual motivation, first in W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) and then, differently, in Georg Simmel (1902-03). We conclude with an approach combining both the individual and collective planes of social theory, in Sigmund Freud (1930). Our course demonstrates the importance of its subject matter to understanding contemporary Western society and the distinct contribution each of the authors makes to its analysis.

Grading Policy

The final grade will be the average of three 4-page essays, adjusted for quality of class participation.

Texts

J. Lough, ed. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert: Selected Articles

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments

R. Tucker, ed. Marx-Engels Reader

Émile Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk

Georg Simmel, Conflict and The Web of Group-Affiliations

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Honors Social Science: Classical and Contemporary Social Theory

Drawing on primary sources, this seminar introduces social theory as the systematic investigation of social life: how it is organized, continually transforms itself, is challenged by problems and conflicts, and is influenced by the behavior of groups and individuals. Topics in classical theory include social equality in democratic societies (Tocqueville), how social structure influences knowledge (Marx), individuals as influenced by the social collective (Durkheim), society as influenced by individual actors (Weber), how social structure influences even intimate relationships (Simmel), mass deception and manipulation through modern culture (Horkheimer and Adorno), and the relationship between the individual’s purposes and the needs of society (Merton). Contemporary topics include how rituals bind us together (Randall Collins), the nature of social cooperation and trust (Karen Cook, Russell Hardin, Margaret Levi), the social consequences of economic structure (Mark Granovetter), the phenomenon of racial difference (Orlando Patterson), power and inequality (Anthony Giddens), and the coming transformation of the nation state (Saskia Sassen).

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Classical Sociological Theory, 3rd ed. (2012). Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

Contemporary Sociological Theory, 3rd ed. (2012). Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

EVALUATION:

Average of four 5-page essays, adjusted for quality of class participation

ABOUT THE PROFESSOR:

Benjamin Gregg teaches social and political theory in the Department of Government as well as at universities in Germany, China, Austria, Japan and Italy. He is the author of Thick Moralities, Thin Politics (public policy suffers when politics are laden with moral doctrines; public policy should work not toward political consensus but toward the more realistic goal of mutual accommodation); Coping In Politics with Indeterminate Norms (while moral validity is relative rather than absolute, and cultural meanings local rather than universal, social integration and democratic politics are still attainable goals); and Human-Rights as Social Construction (human rights can be authored by the average, ordinary people to whom they are addressed, and that they are valid only if embraced by those to whom they would apply). Next year he will publish The Human Rights State (a metaphorical alternative to the nation state, a polity without territory, standing alongside the nation state, as a political and moral commitment that, in the pursuit of human rights, would limit the nation state without undermining it). He is currently working on a book titled Second Nature: The Genetic Self-Transformation of the Human Species (on the moral, political, and legal challenges of the human species taking control of its own genome in the sense of genetic therapy and genetic “enhancement”). He has taught in Plan II for almost 15 years and hopes, in the proximate future, to receive the Chad Oliver Teaching Award and be appointed Director of Plan II.

Prerequisites

Upper division standing

Course Description

Offers an overview of several of the most important contemporary theories on core issues of justice across national borders, including sovereignty, rights to self-determination, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, global poverty and international distributive justice, the social and legal status of women, terrorism, and human rights. Requires the close reading and careful analysis of assigned texts; active participation in student-centered classroom discussions of each issue; and the composition of critical, analytical, and thesis-driven essays.

Flags: Ethics & Leadership, Global Cultures, Writing.

Grading Policy

Final grade: average of three essays, adjusted to reflect the quality of the student’s in-class participation as specified in the syllabus.

Texts

The Global Justice Reader, ed. T. Brooks

Course Description:

A core element of European identity is the notion of freedom in two forms that developed in the modern era: freedom as (a) the individual’s self-determination within his or her private sphere and personal life and (b) the community’s self-determination as a public achievement of private citizens come together to deliberate and decide matters of the res publica. In theory and history, the realization of such freedom has always been fraught with difficulty. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right offers one of the most compelling diagnoses of the ills of modern Western political community with respect to these two freedoms. It also develops some of the most influential standards by which to judge the civil society that undergirds modern European political community and its claims to provide these two freedoms.

Grading Policy:

The final grade will be the average of three essays, each five to six pages, adjusted for quality of class participation, as well as brief, twice-weekly threads to weekly fora on Blackboard.

Texts:

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Course Description:

This course provides a pointed introduction to the broad and heterogeneous field of Political Theory, focusing on three major periods of Western thought by focusing on one of the most important authors in each. The seminar is alive to differences among very distinct approaches to political theory and to strategies in writing philosophical texts. Our approach is not in terms of the history of philosophy (and we do not proceed chronologically); we seek to read our authors in conversation with each other. Plato, Augustine, and Spinoza each display a keen sense of the melancholy of this-worldly finitude, particularly with regard to the crookedness of human timber and the frailty of political community. For Plato, humankind is encumbered by the appetitive part of the soul; Augustine points to original sin and the earthly citizen within each of us; Spinoza speaks of our inescapable bondage to the passions. In contemplating the question, “What is the political?”, all three appeal to an otherworldly standard by which to identify and illuminate the crookedness and frailty of the finite world. That is, they brilliantly limn the profound limitations of what political community might be capable of — in the large sense that links politics with the whole of human experience — by invoking a sense of transcendence in the sense of orienting this-worldly political community on otherworldly perfections not given to man. They picture things wholly beyond, even foreign to humankind: the otherworldly as that which men imagine, as the divinely transcendental, ideal, and sublimely beautiful truth that transfigures the reader. We moderns tend to view matters differently, as in contemporary this-worldly approaches that see man in a thoroughly naturalistic way — and in its own way limns the melancholy of human and natural finitude and the limits of what is possible through design of political community. This seminar evaluates the respective efforts of Plato, Augustine, and Spinoza to guide political community by positing normative standards not limited in the ways that human understanding, behavior, and experience are so strikingly limited. It thematizes the presuppositions of our own time even as it explores politics as understood in classical Greek thought, in early Christianity, and in the early modern era.

Grading Policy:

Course grade based on regular attendance and well-prepared participation as well as one two-page paper written for each session. Each week these papers will generate points of departure for in-class analysis. Seriatim each student will be responsible for writing a short summary of a class discussion, to be presented at the beginning of the following session.

Texts:

Plato: Gorgias

Augustine: The City of God against the Pagans

Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise

Prerequisites

 None

Course Description

This seminar provides a basic introduction to human rights by exploring competing answers to such questions as: What is the idea of human rights? Who are the “humans” of human rights? In a state-centric world, how do human rights relate to the nation-state and beyond any state? How are human rights related to the history of European empire and commerce? How are human rights related to the European Enlightenment? How are human rights related to global poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment? What roles do international instruments play -- or fail to play? How are human rights related to non-European cultures, such as various East Asian and African cultures? The seminar will also consider alternative approaches to understanding and advancing human rights, including human rights as political not theological; generating universal human rights out of local norms; individuals as authors of human rights; translating human rights into local cultural vernaculars; and advancing human rights through cognitive reframing.

Grading Policy

 Average of four essays (each 5 pages), adjusted for quality of in-class participation

 Texts

 Benjamin Gregg, Human Rights as Social Construction (Cambridge University Press, 2012), print

(ISBN-13: 9781107015937) or digital (ISBN-13: 9781139059626)

Drawing on primary sources, this seminar introduces social theory as the systematic investigation of social life: how it is organized, continually transforms itself, is challenged by problems and conflicts, and is influenced by the behavior of groups and individuals. Topics in classical theory include social equality in democratic societies (Tocqueville), how social structure influences knowledge (Marx), individuals as influenced by the social collective (Durkheim), society as influenced by individual actors (Weber), how social structure influences even intimate relationships (Simmel), mass deception and manipulation through modern culture (Horkheimer and Adorno), and the relationship between the individual’s purposes and the needs of society (Merton). Contemporary topics include how rituals bind us together (Randall Collins), the nature of social cooperation and trust (Karen Cook, Russell Hardin, Margaret Levi), the social consequences of economic structure (Mark Granovetter), the phenomenon of racial difference (Orlando Patterson), power and inequality (Anthony Giddens), and the coming transformation of the nation state (Saskia Sassen).

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Classical Sociological Theory, 3rd ed. (2012). Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

Contemporary Sociological Theory, 3rd ed. (2012). Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Virk, eds. Wiley-Blackwell

EVALUATION:

Average of four 5-page essays, adjusted for quality of class participation

ABOUT THE PROFESSOR:

Professor Gregg, who grew up in Berkeley, California, is a social and political theorist with a BA from Yale, a PhD from Princeton (in political science), and a PhD from the Free University of Berlin (in Philosophy). He is the author of Human Rights as Social Construction; Thick Moralities, Thin Politics: Social Integration across Communities of Belief; and Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism. He is completing a book on The Human Rights State and another titled Second Nature: The Genetic Self-Transformation of the Human Species. He is also engaged in a long-term project that draws on files of East German dissidents monitored by the secret police (“Stasi”) until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These projects all deploy classical and contemporary sociological theory to solve problems in political philosophy. He has taught at universities in China, Japan, and Germany. The College of Liberal Arts Committees on Research and Teaching awarded him the Silver Spurs Fellowship in recognition of outstanding scholarship and teaching. He is partial to theater and hopes someday to become a playwright.

This seminar offers an overview of some of the most important contemporary theories on core issues of justice across national borders, including sovereignty, rights to self-determination, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, global poverty and international distributive justice, the social and legal status of women, terrorism, and human rights.

Honors Section - Restricted to honor's students

FLAGS

Global Cultures Flag, Writing Flag

DESCRIPTION

This seminar examines how major thinkers of the European Enlightenment, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, challenged by interaction with the non-Western world deeper and more complex than ever before, and concerned about the legitimacy of conquest and colonization, responded with core concepts of modern political theory: reason, progress, sovereignty, property, freedom, and rights. The seminar also examines how the political postulate of freedom (all humans as free and equal moral beings) is partially rescinded where Enlightenment thinkers categorize different human communities and place them in a normative hierarchy.

This year’s version of this seminar will focus on Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), the great Romantic thinker whose political thought influenced the elites that guided the French and American Revolutions; who championed the deeply modernist forms of subjectivity and introspection; who advocated the education of the whole person for citizenship; and who contributed to the genre of the sentimental novel that encouraged the idea of human rights.

Future versions of this seminar may focus on Vitoria, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Voltaire, Diderot, or d’Alembert.

REQUIRED READINGS

First and Second Discourses, On the Social Contrac, tEmile or On Education, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker

WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS

The final grade will be the average of three essays, adjusted for quality of class participation.

Please check back for updates.

This course has a writing flag.

Social Science: Social Science Theories of the Subject

The European Enlightenment of the 18th century gave rise to master narratives of the subject as a sovereign figure capable of rational control of his or her worlds. Since then we in the West have re-imagined and re-configured ourselves multiple times in multiple ways. The seminar traces out this “civilizational autobiography,” beginning with the “modern, enlightenment self” (Kant and Marx), taken as an individual. It then examines the “solidary self” (Tönnies, Durkheim, and Mauss), or the self as a communal member. Next we turn to the “modern self fragmented” (Simmel and Weber), with consequences positive and negative. Then we examine the “interior self” (Freud) and subsequently the “self as the other of the socially dominant one,” with one examples from sex (de Beauvoir) and one from race (Du Bois). Finally we discuss the “symbolically or strategically interacting self” (Mead and Goffman). The instructor will introduce the life of each author, and his or her contributions to some of the great humanistic theories in social science. In this student-centered seminar, class will be devoted in part to discussion with and among students.

Readings:

BOOKS: Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society; W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk; Max Weber, From Max Weber; Marcel Mauss, The Gift; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex; Erving Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

PACKET: Émile Durkheim, “Forms of Social Solidarity,” “Anomie and Moral Structure,” “Religion and Ritual”; Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?”; Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” “The Stranger,” The Philosophy of Money; Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor”

Requirements:

NOTE: THIS COURSE WILL FULFILL THE AREA B REQUIREMENT FOR THE PLAN II DEGREE, BUT WILL NOT COUNT TOWARD THE AREA B REQUIREMENT FOR OTHER DEGREES.

The final grade will be the average of four essays (length to be specified), adjusted for quality of class participation. Class participation includes each one or more students (on a rotating basis) submitting brief “theses” on the week’s readings, and one or more students responding to the theses.

About the professor: 

Professor Gregg is a social and political theorist with a BA from Yale, a PhD from Princeton (in political science), and a PhD from the Free University of Berlin (in Philosophy). He is the author of Thick Moralities, Thin Politics: Social Integration Across Communities of Belief and Coping in Politics With Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism. He is currently completing a book titled The Human-Rights Project: Social Construction without Theology or Metaphysics, which develops a conception of human rights as social constructions whose validity can be developed locally and freely embraced as indigenous, in diverse cultures and political communities, rather than imposed from outside. His research focuses on social integration in complex modern societies; problems and prospects of contemporary forms of justice, including human rights; coping with value pluralism within democratic societies but also in non-liberal polities around the world; “enlightened localism” and “thin norms” as practical strategies for accomplishing social integration and legal justice in both liberal and hierarchical societies; deploying contemporary sociological theory to solve problems in political philosophy. He has taught at universities in Germany, China, and Japan. UT’s College of Liberal Arts Committees on Research and Teaching awarded him the Silver Spurs Fellowship in recognition of outstanding scholarship and teaching. He recently received a research fellowship from the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung, Berlin-Babelsberg, Germany, undertaken at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He is partial to foreign travel, foreign films, foreign food, and to foreigners in general.

Course Description: This seminar offers an overview of some of the most important writings on core issues of global justice, including sovereignty, rights to self-determination, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, global poverty and international distributive justice, the social and legal status of women, terrorism, and human rights.

Grading Policy: A student’s final grade will be the average of three essays, adjusted significantly for quality of in-class participation.

Textbooks: [1] The Global Justice Reader, ed. Thom Brooks (Blackwell Publishing, 2008).  [2] B. Gregg, Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms (SUNY Press, 2003).

Seminar in Political Theory and Philosophy.

HONORS SOCIAL SCIENCE: THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

The problem of whether and to what extent we humans are in control, or can be in control, of ourselves – of our identities but also of our behavior and understanding, both public and private – is what in this course I refer to as the “problem of the subject.” The problem of the subject is the never completed social task of constructing intersubjectively valid understandings of fundamental human identity. For example, are human beings moved by social, emotional, and psychological forces beyond their control or can they control themselves and their environment through the power of their own reasoning? This seminar explores different answers to this question by analyzing seminal works of European thinkers of the late modern era, works that have powerfully influenced our notions of the subject today. We also read one of the instructor’s attempts to answer this question.

The European Enlightenment of the 18th century gave rise to master narratives of the subject as a sovereign figure capable of rational control of his or her worlds.  We begin then with the “modern self” (Kant and Marx), subsequently observe it as “whole” or in solidarity (Durkheim) and then in fragmentation (Weber and Simmel). We turn then to the discovery of the self’s “other” (for example as sex, as in Beauvoir).  We also examine the discovery of the self’s “interiority” (Freud). Next we observe the self conceived as “structure” (Foucault) and the self not reducible to structure (Bourdieu). Our path then leads to the critically engaged, insistently modern self (Habermas) and, finally, the self as the collective author and addressee of fundamental political choices (Gregg). In lectures introducing each author, the instructor will offer a range of disciplinary perspectives from theories in social science. A significant amount of class time will be devoted to discussion with and among students, in this student-centered seminar.

REQUIRED BOOKS

[1] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, [2] Pierre Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, [3] The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, [4] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, [5] B. Gregg, Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms, [6] Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (vol. 2), [7] Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. Tucker, [8] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

SELECTIONS IN REQUIRED PACKET

[1] Émile Durkheim, “Forms of Social Solidarity,” “Anomie and Moral Structure,” “Religion and Ritual,” [2] Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” [3] Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” “The Stranger,” and selection from The Philosophy of Money, [4] William Shakespeare, King Lear

THE SELF IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR: REQUIRED ATTENDANCE

Students are required to attend one of the following performances by Actors from the London Stage of King Lear: September 30-October 2, 7:30 p.m., at the B. Iden Payne Theater, Winship Building (Q&A with actors after performance on the 30th); or October 3 at 7 pm at Winedale Theatre Barn in Round Top. Purchase student ticket in advance.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

 Please check back for updates.

Seminar in Political Theory and Philosophy.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

Seminar in Political Theory and Philosophy.

 Please check back for updates.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

 Please check back for updates.

 Please check back for updates.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

 Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Seminar in Political Theory and Philosophy.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

 Please check back for updates.

 Please check back for updates.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

 Please check back for updates.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

Seminar in Public Law.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

 Please check back for updates.

Seminar in Public Law.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

 Please check back for updates.

Seminar in Political Theory and Philosophy.

Government 312L satisfies the second half of the mandated six hours of government that every UT student must take.  Course covers analysis of varying topics concerned with American political institutions and policies, including the United States Constitution, and assumes basic knowledge of government from GOV 310L, which is a prerequiste. May be taken for credit only once.

Seminar in Political Theory and Philosophy.