GOVT 86.51 The Idea of Socialism: Radical Political Theory from the French Revolution to Marx
In recent years, socialism has been making something of a comeback in contemporary political discourse. Three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after a long-term decline of once-powerful socialist and social-democratic parties throughout the world, the renewed forms of socialist politics of the 2010s and ‘20s offer us the occasion to take a fresh look back at a tradition with much deeper roots in the history of the modern world. What exactly is the idea of socialism?
This course aims to come at this question by studying the central period of the socialist tradition’s initial formation, in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Students will read and analyze original sources—works of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and others—representing some of the key texts of the early socialists. The half-century following the French Revolution is not only the founding period of the tradition but also contains a large amount of debate over different ideas the socialist movement itself. We will try to understand which commitments defined socialism and the degree to which contemporary politics does or does not answer those concerns.
Instructor
Monahan