Courses

Political action was a major topic of political debate throughout the twentieth century.  A whole range of Marxist, existentialist, progressive, anarchist, and anticolonial thinkers wrestled with the legitimacy and efficacy of new forms of mass political action – such as the boycott, civil disobedience, and the general strike – as well as the possibility of armed revolution.  These were all techniques of protest and mobilization that were extrainstitutional and often extra-legal.  But their advocates put forward a range of arguments to show why these forms of mass action are necessary, legitimate, and democratic in form and purpose.  This course returns to these debates to consider the distinctive moral and political dilemmas that arise from insurgent forms of mass political action. 

 

Some of our organizing concerns and questions will include:  

 

1. The morality and efficacy of violence and nonviolence as techniques of popular protest and collective mobilization; what counts as coercion in politics and when it might be judged permissible and necessary.  

2. The meaning and experience of political action: what inspires people to act; the relationship between action, agency, and freedom; action as a form of self-making.

3. The means-ends question: how closely connected are political ideals to the forms of action used to bring them about; how political action prefigures political ends.

4. Anxieties about mass action and its unintended consequences; questions about how to channel, organize, and discipline popular revolt.