Critical Thinking In Political Science-Study Sheet 2018-2019 PDF

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Critical Thinking in Political Science: Study Guide for 2018-2019 *Terms and questions in red will not appear on the exam, but can be useful to look at for the sake of contextualizing and thinking through other questions, and for putting things into the broader perspective of the course. *I am afraid that this is still a work in progress. The final version will be online before the end of the day today (28 December). Everything here is as it will be on the final version…I only will be adding a question or two for weeks 1-6, plus the final questions for weeks 7-11. In the meantime, those of you want to have an idea of what’s in store for the second part of the study guide can refer to part 3 of the study sheet from last year (also uploaded to Minerva)…that portion of this year’s study sheet will be very close to last year’s. Week 1: What is Critical Thinking? Key Terms:  Critical thinking  Analysis  Critique  Epistemology  Ontology  Teleology  Objectivity  Modernity  Foundationalist (or ontology

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“realist”)

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Emergent (or “antifoundationalist”) ontology Reflexivity Reason Truth Inductive method Deductive method Analogical method Ideology Consciousness

Short Answer Questions:  As we saw over the course of the semester, the analytical and critical traditions represent distinct approaches to knowing, thinking about and acting upon the world. Yet, in spite of fundamental differences, both can reasonably claim to provide a foundation for critical thinking and judgment. What, at the most basic level, does it mean to think critically? In what sense can both the analytical and critical traditions claim to represent “critical” approaches to knowing and understanding the political world, and how did each react against earlier ways of knowing and thinking? Finally, if both are in some sense critical, what, exactly, does the critical tradition represent? What distinguishes it from analytical ways of knowing and thinking?  Critique is usually seen as a negative activity. “It’s easy to criticize,” people say; or, “Don’t just criticize, do something!” The popular image of the critic is someone who sits in the sofa telling others how to do things better. In this course, we have looked at critique as a quintessentially productive and creative activity. What is the link between critique and creative practice? Do you think that critique can open up spaces for productive engagement? Provide an example to illustrate your response.  In class, I suggested that critical consciousness first appeared together with the emergence of monotheism in the ancient Near East. What is the basis for this suggestion? How might monotheism be linked to the fundamental problems and questions that we associate with critical method today? (Hint: Monotheism posed the question of “Truth” in a new, existential way…take it from there!)

Week 2: Reconciling Law and Freedom: Liberalism and the Problem of Political Modernity Key Terms:  Liberalism  Liberty  Emancipation  Thomas Hobbes  The state of nature  Metaphysics  Materialism (metaphysical)  Idealism  Determinism  Empiricism

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Game Theory (e.g., prisoner’s dilemma) Conventionalism (Constructivism) Edmund Burke Jean-Jacques Rousseau Amour Propre John Locke John Rawls

Short Answer Questions:  In what sense were notions of political subjectivity revolutionized in the early modern period (i.e., ca. 1500-1700)? In what sense were these new understandings of the political subject related to the emergence of an analytical, scientific worldview? And, more specifically, how was this subject discerned and actualized in the political theory of Thomas Hobbes? Make sure to elaborate on the analytical significance of “the state of nature” when elaborating on Hobbes’s attempt to provide a rational proof for absolute sovereignty.  In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke—an antiEnlightenment thinker often held up as the father of modern political conservatism —wrote the following: “Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.” In what sense does this passage reject a foundational principle of Enlightenment liberal political thought? Hobbes and Burke are both deeply politically conservative, but this passage reveals some fundamental differences in perspective between the two. Elaborate on these differences. In what sense might we consider Burke’s critique of Enlightenment reason “critical?”

Week 3: Dialectics, Dialectical Idealism and Dialectical Materialism Key Terms:  Hegel

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Dialectical method

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Immanent teleology Socio-metabolic process Contradictory unity Process (or “processual”) ontology Relational ontology Inter-subjectivity

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Alienation “Dialectic of the Master and the Slave” Creative destruction Commodity fetishism; fetish “practical-critical activity” Essentialism

Short Answer:  What does Fukuyama mean with the phrase “the end of History?” What, according to Fukuyama, is the difference between history and History? And what is the basis for his claim that History has converged on liberal democracy as the ultimate mode of political organization and being? Make sure to be explicit about how Fukuyama draws on the philosophy of Hegel. In what sense is Fukuyama’s (and Hegel’s) approach idealist? Explain.  What is dialectical about Marx and Engels’ characterization of the bourgeoisie and their “world-making” projects in the Communist Manifesto? How does their account/critique build on Hegel’s elaboration of the “master-slave dialectic” (aka, “dialectic of lordship and bondage”)? Do you think that this framework of critique might be usefully applied to contemporary global developments? Provide an example or two and briefly explain why or why not.  The urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote that " The city is man's most consistent and, on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself." How does this statement reflect Marx’s practical (as opposed to metaphysical) materialism, as expressed in the “Theses on Feuerbach” (aka, “Concerning Feuerbach)? And what are the critical implications of this approach when it comes to thinking about the relation between science and the world that constitutes its object?

Week 4: Knowledge and Power: Genealogy Key Terms:  Genealogical Method  Paradigm  “Historical contents”  “Threshold epistemologization”  “Hermeneutics of Suspicion”  Contingency  Intelligibility

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Truth and Power Calculability Conditions of possibility Emergence as opposed to origins Perfomativity Friedrich Nietzsche Michel Foucault

Short Answer:  Michel Foucault stated that his goal was not to analyze the phenomena of power as such, but rather to elaborate a genealogy of the modern subject. What does a genealogical critique imply in practice (i.e., what are the objectives of genealogical critique, and how does one go about doing it)? More specifically, what might

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Foucault be trying to get at through a genealogy of the modern subject? Make a link to the notions of governmentality and performativity, and provide at least one concrete example (examples can be drawn from outside those discussed in the lectures or readings assigned for this class). In his essay “Principles True in Every Country,” Timothy Mitchell takes the formation of property rights in Egypt as an entry point for tracing the “genealogy of the Law.” In what sense are property rights constitutive of “the Law” in the classical liberal understanding? And how does his analysis of the making of private property in Egypt expose the arbitrariness underpinning the liberal conception of the Law? Towards the end of his lecture of “7 January 1976,” Michel Foucault identifies a shift from thinking about government through the paradigm of war to a modern understanding of government grounded in notions of economy. Drawing on readings by Timothy Mitchell, Karl Polanyi, Anna Tsing and Thomas Lemke— together with the lecture by Pieter Rondelez (powerpoint and lecture notes have been posted on Minerva)—identify the work of disentangling, reducing, classifying and ordering that went (and goes) into producing a world that appears amenable to market-oriented modes of political reason. How might Nietzsche’s observation that “by the morality of morals and the social straightjacket, mankind was made calculable” apply to this work of making an economic world? What is the fundamental issue at stake in the debate between Foucault and Chomsky? What distinguishes Foucault’s approach from that of Chomsky? And in what sense is Foucault’s reformulation of the question at the center of the debate “genealogical?” Or, to put it differently, how does that reformulation open the issue to genealogical inquiry/critique? (see video + exerpt from Rabinow, both of which were discussed in detail in class; note Foucault’s tendency to pose “how” questions rather than “what” questions.) What does Foucault mean when he writes: “What types of knowledge are you trying to disqualify when you say you are a science?” How does the question relate to a genealogical concern for the constitutive relations between knowledge (or truth) and power? And how does the genealogical perspective understand and approach this constitutive relation? Provide an example to illustrate the point.

Week 5: The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory Key Terms:  Commodification  Reification  Subjective Reason  Instrumental Reason  Communicative rationality  The Culture Industry  Negativity

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Chantal Mouffe Agonism Theodor Adorno Max Horkheimer Herbert Marcuse Jurgen Habermas

Short Answer:  The Frankfurt School theorists made a distinction between objective and subjective reason, and argued that liberal modes of political order—together with the analytical modes of scientific inquiry within which liberal reason finds itself entangled—were premised on the latter. What, according to the Frankfurt School theorists, distinguishes objective from subjective reason? In what sense did they see liberal theory as premised on the reduction of human experience to subjective reason? And why did they see this as dehumanizing, destructive and—ultimately—

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dangerous? If you can, make a link to the work of Karl Polanyi in formulating your answer. Jurgen Habermas is universally recognized as the key figure of the Frankfurt School’s “second generation.” Yet Habermas took Critical Theory in a decidedly non-revolutionary direction, ultimately drawing on the tradition of pragmatism to try and effect a reconciliation between the insights of critical theory and the practical political accomplishments of liberalism. Characterize the main thrust of Habermas’s political and theoretical program, and compare it to the perspective of Chantal Mouffe. What does Mouffe mean by “the return of the political?” And what is the thrust of her critique of Habermas and Fukuyama? In Counter-Revolution and Revolt, Herbert Marcuse wrote: “For history indeed repeats itself. It is this repetition of domination and suppression that must be halted, and halting it presupposes knowledge of its genesis and of the ways in which it is produced: critical thinking.” The quote is remarkable in the sense that it seems to suggest that critical thinking produces, rather than opposes, the particular modes of domination and suppression that are characteristic of liberal, modern ways of political existence. In what sense—under what modalities or conditions—might critical thinking be the problem rather than the solution? And to what extent might contemporary social and political movements, on the left as well as on the right, have fallen into the trap that he points to? Provide examples to back up your take on Marcuse’s argument.

Week 6: The Politics of Space-Time Key Terms:  Assemblage  Scale  TINA  Multiple temporalities  Anthropocene

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“aspatial globalization” Spatial fabric “Unthought cosmologies” Metabolic process

Short Answer:  In making the case “for space,” Doreen Massey points to the blind spots in accounts that represent the “non-Western” world as somehow behind in the historical que. What does Massey mean when she asserts that social theory has “turned space into time?” Why might it be problematic to view, say, the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa as simply behind “the West?” How might attention to space (or, more specifically, the relations that articulate space) enable us to engage with questions of difference more politically? Indeed, in what sense is the notion of progress—the temporal structure of modernity—derived from spatial arrangements?  In “The Arts of Noticing,” Tsing points to the co-presence of, and to the productivity of entanglements between, “multiple temporalities.” What does she mean by “multiple temporalities?” How might attention to the entanglement of different temporalities help us to think about the force of global capitalism without getting stuck in narratives of progress and ruin?...