PSIR223

History of Political Thought

What is political thought or political philosophy? It simply looks like a branch of political science. One could argue that political thought is yet another subfield of political science just like Turkish politics, international relations, or comparative politics. However, as its purpose is to lay bare the fundamental problems, concepts, and categories which frame the study of politics, political thought is actually the oldest and most fundamental part of political science. In this respect, it constitutes the foundation of the entire discipline. Without grasping the stakes involved in the history of political thought, students of politics could adopt shallow and reductionist positions with respect to contemporary politics. When it is interpreted as the study of the great books or great thinkers of the past, political thought could easily degenerate into a kind of antiquarianism, which risks overlooking the issues of our contemporary world. Students of political science study the classical texts of political thought because they provide us with the most basic questions that continue to guide our field. They remain in many ways constitutive of our most basic outlooks and attitudes regarding the deepest problems of political life. They provide us with a repository of fundamental questions that political scientists still continue to rely on in their work. Among the great thinkers, however, there is profound disagreement over the answers to even the most fundamental questions of political science concerning justice, politics, morality, liberty, and so on and so forth and it is precisely this disagreement that makes it possible for us to enter into their conversation. This course has a double focus. It attempts to convey to undergraduate students the content of the political ideas of some leading thinkers in the history of western political philosophy. It also tries to relate this content to the historical context from which these ideas emerged. Taking Şerif Mardin’s course on ‘political thought’ at the Sabancı University in 2006 as a model, this course features political concepts and ideas in relation to their context. Instead of representing the tradition of western political philosophy as a series of ‘great ideas’ by canonical figures, we shall ‘recontextualize’ the history of political ideas within their historical (economic, social, political, intellectual) framework. The fact that we have uncovered the historical “embeddedness” of a theory does not preclude us from questioning the internal logic of this theory. Nonetheless, the importance of western political thinkers does not only consist in cogency of their views, but also in their historical meaning. To give an example, we will discuss Plato’s idea of the ‘philosopher king’ as a critique of the Athenian democracy which was, at that time, on the brink of collapse after the end of the Peloponnesian war. Likewise, we will examine the concept of the ‘tyranny of majority’ of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill in relation to the liberal critique of the emerging modern democracy in Europe and the United States. With this contextual approach, students will grasp the organic relationship between political ideas and political history.