Course Details
| Department & Course Number | POL SCI 255, Section 201 |
| Class Number | |
| Course Type | Undergraduate (Milwaukee Campus) |
| Credits | 3 |
| Meets Requirements | Social Science (SS) |
| Instructor | Ivan Ascher |
| Course Dates | June 24 - July 20, 2024 (Second 4-week Session) |
If you are interested in political and philosophical discussions but are tired of overly predictable debates, this course may be for you. Don’t get me wrong: debates about abortion rights, gun control and vaccines are undeniably important; but they are also terribly predictable. In large part, that is because they are reflective of our ideologies: the worldviews and clusters of beliefs that we have inherited from our surroundings or that we have somehow embraced.
Of course these ideologies can be helpful: they help us make sense of the world’s problems, they help us evaluate policy proposals; they even give us a sense of our place in the world and can tell us what is to be done. But they can also make it difficult to relate to others who may not share our worldview, and they can certainly get in the way of thinking.
In this course, we will learn to identify the various ideologies that structure our political discourse, in order that we might begin to move beyond them. More precisely, we will return to the original arguments made by the various political theorists, historians, or economists whose writings first gave rise to these ideologies. This will help us understand where our existing ideas and commitments come from, while also freeing us to decide for ourselves what we may want to do with them. By distinguishing between the articles of faith associated such ideologies as liberalism, conservatism, socialism, etc. and the various arguments put forth by the likes of John Stuart Mill, Edmund Burke, or Karl Marx, we can loosen the grip these ideologies have had on our political imagination, while also availing ourselves of the resources they contain.