POL 1201 is also offered in Spring 2025
POL 1201 is also offered in Fall 2024
POL 1201 is also offered in Spring 2024
POL 1201 is also offered in Fall 2023
POL 1201 is also offered in Spring 2023
POL 1201 is also offered in Fall 2022
POL 1201 is also offered in Summer 2022
POL 1201 is also offered in Spring 2022
POL 1201 is also offered in Fall 2021
POL 1201 is also offered in Summer 2021
Fall 2021 | POL 1201 Section 001: Political Ideas (19008)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
Mon,
Wed 11:15AM - 12:30PM
UMTC, West Bank
Anderson Hall 270
- Enrollment Status:
Open (146 of 149 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- This course serves as an introduction to the study of political theory. Political theory analyzes the meaning and significance of fundamental concepts in politics. Starting from such basic concerns as the nature of politics, humans, power and justice, political theorists explore how these basic starting assumptions organize the norms, practices, and institutions of political and social order. To explore these topics, the field turns to key texts, as well as to political and social events and other media (film, historical documents, etc.). In this introductory course, students will investigate some of the basic texts in political theory, with the goal of learning how to read texts more analytically and to address fundamental questions in political theory. Among the topics that might be the nature of justice and injustice, political obligation and civil disobedience, democracy and other forms of governance. Students who complete this course will understand the deep issues about the nature of politics, will have learned to read and to analyze complex texts. They will also have had the opportunity to reflect upon their own ethical engagement in political life and upon the ways in which historically, political ideas change.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?POL1201+Fall2021
- Class Description:
- What does it mean to be free? What is the proper relationship between the individual and the community? What is power and how should it be limited? How we answer these questions matters for how we think about politics and how we live our lives. This course offers students an introduction to three branches of political thought that have each sought to provide coherent answers to these questions. They are Republicanism, Liberalism, and Socialism, and though they do not exhaust the wide spectrum of political thought, each has appeared and reappeared over the course of Western history as various thinkers have grappled with questions of freedom, duty, and power. In this course we will consider a few of the most important formulations of these three "isms" in the writings of figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx. Each of these thinkers is important not just because each produced excellent works of political theory, but also because their works have come to form part of the vocabulary of modern political discourse, both inside and outside of academic settings, making an understanding of their writings necessary for any understanding of contemporary politics.
- Exam Format:
- 60% Reports/Papers
30% Reflection Papers
10% Class Participation
- Class Format:
- 50% Lecture
40% Discussion
10% Small Group Activities
- Workload:
- 50 Pages Reading Per Week
12-15 Pages Writing Per Term
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/19008/1219
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 9 January 2017
ClassInfo Links - Fall 2021 Political Science Classes