modern western civilization

SPRING 1995

HISTORY 102/203 & 008

EVOLUTION OF WESTERN IDEAS AND INSTITUTIONS SINCE THE 17th CENTURY

102/203: MWF: 10:30-11:20, LT-912 (WTC)

102/008: MWF: 2:30-3:20, DU-119 (LSC)

Zouhair Ghazzal

zouhairghazzal.com

Crown 544: M: 5:00-6:00

(and by appointment)

zghazza@luc.edu

The purpose of this course is to study the history of ideas, discourses, and institutions in Western civilizations from the 17th century to the present. We shall operate at two interrelated levels. On the one hand, the course aims at a brief survey of the main events, personalities, and institutions that we think are crucial for understanding the modern history of Western civilizations and their evolution from feudal Europe. On the other hand—and this shall be our main concern this semester—, one week shall be devoted to a close study of a key text of each one of the following authors: Locke’s Second Treatise, Tocqueville on Democracy in America Adam Smith on The Wealth of Nations, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, Freud’s Civilization, Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, and finally, Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness. The approach of this course shall be “textual” to the point of focusing almost exclusively on the six authors/texts, and even though a background reading is scheduled for each topic, this course does not presuppose any extensive knowledge of the modern social and political history of Europe.

There are several ways to cover a four-century history of Western civilization. A first possibility would be a type of political history à la Tocqueville where some of the main political movements of the period are analyzed: The British and French revolutions and their respective state models; the anti-state models of Germany and Italy in terms of difficulties of achieving “unification” and their totalitarian experiences during World War II; how imperialism became, since the middle of the 19th century, a political and economic necessity for the core European states, and in particular, the role of the bourgeoisie as an ascending class in this experience; communism, fascism, and the totalitarian movements of the 20th century; the welfare state model and its current crisis—this should, of course, be seen as part of the crisis of “late capitalism”; etc.

The other equally challenging approach would be a social history within a Braudelian perspective that would integrate several levels: The cities and their countrysides, the trade routes, the evolution of capitalism and the way it creates geographical differences, etc. Such an approach would analyze how capitalism creates centers of powers that dominate over other weaker economic centers. All this is done within a longue durée perspective, i.e. each level should be followed up over a long period of several centuries.

There are, of course, several other possible approaches. Historical anthropology that focuses on institutions within a sociological/ anthropological horizon is one of them. I have, however, deliberately chosen the two approaches briefly outlined above in order to make a sharp contrast with what still constitutes the dominant genre of writing history—history as a chronology of events that unfolds in a semi natural order. In fact, one of the simplest ways to organize historical data is to leave them unfold on a horizontal time axis. This time is the “natural” one that would help us organize data in a sequence of events and facts that we presuppose unfold within a time framework belonging to nature: What comes “after” is explained by what comes “before,” not so much in a cause and effect relationship, but more within the perspective of a time naturally unfolding. In fact, what probably still makes chronological history the most popular genre is that this type of writing history presupposes a primacy to natural time, the time of nature; it is as if historical events unfold in a natural order and are self-explainable and comprehensible in such an order. To take one well known example among several, the events leading to this other major event, known as the “French Revolution,” not only “explain” the latter but also provide us with its rationale and mode of becoming.

Even though each one of the approaches briefly outlined above and others as well share important advantages in what they can explain of a particular historical period, they might lead however to problems in particular within the “context” of a so-called “survey” course. If a Tocquevillian approach to society and politics needs a great deal of prior knowledge on the societies in question, a social history approach with a Braudelian perspective could only be properly approached within the broader, and more ambitious, social sciences perspectives. But whatever the risks may be, a one semester “survey” course cannot possibly incorporate several approaches or even one in-depth at a time. Thus our method shall necessarily—and unfortunately—be “eclectic” in the sense that it shall focus on a narrow selection of texts/authors without being able to achieve an extensive in-depth historical analysis. This, of course, is disappointing, but also unavoidable.

Let us now focus on the texts themselves. There are, of course, an infinite number of themes with authors of this caliber. We shall, however, focus mainly on themes discussing the relation between the “state” and “civil society” on the one hand, and “political economy” on the other. Another concern shall be, through psychoanalysis and the modern “culture of narcisissim,” the role of the “individual,” and the construction of the “self” and “subject” in our post-modern societies. Hobbes (whom unfortunately we are not covering) was among the first writers of the 17th century to have systematically discussed the necessity for a “coercive government”—what is usually referred to as “Absolutism”—in order to avoid the anarchy of the “state of nature.” Men and women are competitive by nature and a fair degree of competitiveness could only be regulated by means of a just monarch. Hobbes, like Machiavelli before him, was probably among the first to have logically and systematically shown the necessity of a centralized state structure under the absolute rule of a monarch. In short, Hobbes’s argument is that by giving the monarch part of the personal freedom I would have enjoyed under the hypothetical state of nature, I am expecting in exchange a right to live “safely” under his government. The “fear of death,” says Hobbes, haunts us all, and we would do anything we could to secure our lives. Thus, for Hobbes, the state seems to be a collective will, and a collective “state of mind” since the whole “mental enterprise” presupposes an implicit covenant between individuals in a society, rather than between the individuals and the state: I give part of my freedom, i.e. I accept the coercive actions of my government, in exchange for the right of life (safety). A century later, and several decades before the French Revolution, Rousseau shall argue that the “social contract” is between the individuals and their government. The “contract,” however, should not be confounded with the “law” because the latter is reversible while the former is not.

Despite all the refinements and nuances that were brought in the last three centuries to the concepts of “state” and “civil society,” Hobbes’s insights remain overall impressively “modern” in the sense of still making sense for societies like ours. A post-Hobbesian line of thinkers shall, on the one hand, delimit the power that the state had over the lives of its individuals, and the specific “rights of the individual” on the other. The former aspect was done thoroughly by John Locke, and the latter by Rousseau. Locke worked out the complicated procedures behind the “balance of powers” of the judicial, political, and executive branches of government. Locke’s “separation of powers” between the three branches of government became a landmark in western political and legal thoughts. Its impact, since then, on the British and American forms of government is fairly obvious to the point that the two hundred-year-old American constitution is often described as Lockian in form and content.

If Hobbes’s question was “What is the most rational system that would preserve the lives of competing individuals?,” that of Locke was the following: “How can we avoid a totally oppressive form of government?” Those questions shall be subjected to new unexpected turns during the last two centuries. Rousseau shall be more concerned with the “freedom” of the individual and how the state could protect this freedom. This shall also be the question of the French Revolution. Then, with the industrial revolution, a new set of questions shall emerge: With societies focusing primarily on production, what kind of man are we creating? And how is this new homo economicus related to the political? (Marx and Engels). Marx and Engels thought that man is primarily a producing being and that the “freedom” of individuals lies not in some political abstract concept à la Rousseau, but in their controlling what they produce and how they produce it, i.e. the complete cycle of production.

Marx and Engels were among the first to have provided us with a sociology of capitalism. Marxist concepts on the division of labor, the surplus-value, the cycles of capital, etc. have become standard today, and were used and abused of throughout this century. For example, the idea of an ever expanding capitalist economy was at the cornerstone of Lenin’s conceptualization of “imperialism.” Imperialism is a turn of the century concept. In its simplest form, imperialism was the political will of the core producing European capitalist states to expand their markets and conquer the “peripheries,” by force if necessary. Politically, imperialism gave this nascent class, the bourgeoisie, the possibility to conquer the political sphere.

When studying the 20th century, one of our main tasks shall be to see how apparently different political systems and movements coexisted side by side within the core producing European societies: Imperialism, totalitarianism, fascism, and communism coexisted side by side with the most modern welfare states of late capitalism. All these apparently incompatible political and social systems coexisted within a world capitalist economy. Does this “oneness” of the economy mean that we have capitalism everywhere including in what was known as the “Eastern Bloc”? There has been several arguments in favor of the idea that so-called communist and socialist societies had for several decades state run capitalism. Whatever that may be, the point here is that we should avoid looking at societies at the surface, especially the way they are labeled by themselves and others.

Marx (and Marxism in general) brought a radical critique to the philosophy of the enlightenment, and so did Freud. Instead of starting with the general abstract questions of the enlightenment, “Who is man? What can we know? What can we do?,” both Marx and Freud had the producing men and women at the center of their thought. They also both came with the idea that what individuals think of themselves in their daily producing life is nothing but a “false consciousness”—an “ideology” for Marx, and “consciousness” for Freud as opposed to the “unconscious” where desires remain hidden. This process from a distorted type of consciousness to a free undistorted one can only take place through the medium of language. Freud’s message paved the way towards a new way of thinking—“modernity”—that has affected many thinkers and trends, among them are Horkheimer and Kundera.

READINGS

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government;

Tocqueville, Democracy in America;

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations;

Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto;

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents;

Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason;

Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being.

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE

I	Government
	Week 1: January 16, 18 & 20, 1995 Week 2: January 23, 25 & 27	Locke
II	Government & Society in America
	Week 3: January 30 & February 1 &3 Week 4: February 6 & 8	Tocqueville
	February 10: First Interpretation Exercise
III	Liberalism & Laissez-faire
	Week 5: February 13, 15 & 17 Week 6: February 20 & 24	Smith
	February 22: No Class
IV	Socialism & Communism
	Week 7: February 27 & March 1 & 3	Marx & Engels
	March 6-March 12: Spring Break March 15: First Draft Deadline
V	Psychoanalysis
	Week 8: March 13, 15 & 17 Week 9: March 20 & 22	Freud
	March 24: Second Interpretation Exercise
VI	Reason & Modernity
	Week 10: March 27, 29 & 31 Week 11: April 3, 5 & 7	Horkheimer
	March 14-17: Easter Vacation
VII	Lightness of Being
	Week 12: April 10, 12, 19 & 21 Week 13: April 24 & 26 April 28: Discussion of Term-Papers	Kundera
	April 29: Last Day of Classes
	*April 28: Term Paper Deadline*
	*May 3: Final Interpretation Exercise, 8:30-10:30 for section 102/203 (WTC), includes all the material; & May 5 for section 102/008 (LSC), 8:00-10:00.*

RECOMMENDED READING

Historiography

Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. A collection of articles that discusses the new “cultural history,” a recent trend that focuses on the importance of language in understanding political and social trends—the “linguistic turn.”

Momigliano, Arnaldo. The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Palmer, Bryan D. Descent into Discourse. The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Reddy, William M. Money and Liberty in Modern Europe. A Critique of Historical Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. A critical study on modern historiographical trends related in particular to social and economic history.

Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Wallach relates gender to history and language and thus joins the “linguistic turn” school that focuses on the importance of language in structuring social and economic movements.

B. H. Moss, “Republican Socialism and the Making of the Working Class in Britain, France, and the United States: A Critique of Thompsonian Culturalism,” Comparative Study in Society and History, 35(2) 1993, 390-413. This essay is an attempt to analyze the impact that had Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class on studies of labor movements in France, England, and the United States, on the one hand, and the weaknesses of such “culturalist” analyses (as opposed to the Marxist and neo-Marxist) on the other. Moss concludes that what these studies have unknowingly confirmed is the traditional and Marxist view that socialism arises when intellectuals bearing collectivist ideas join with workers undergoing a process of proletarianization.

Carrard, Philippe. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier. Parallax Re-visions of Culture and Society, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Excellent introduction to the Annales tradition in historiography. More broadly, Carrard shows that the discipline of history is now marked by fragmentation and that histoire totale (in the strong sense of the project) is dead.

Editorial. “Histoire et sciences sociales. Un tournant critique?” Annales É.S.C. 2 (April-March 1988): 291-293. A key editorial of the Annales in which a “crisis” in contemporary historiography was admitted for the first time and a rapprochement with the rest of the social sciences is now considered as essential for the writing of a new (more fragmented) history. The notion of “document” is also questioned and a more “textual” approach seem to be suggested. Some of the responses to this editorial have been collected in the special issue of November-December 1989 celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Annales.

Dominick LaCapra, History & Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1985). With essays on Ginzburg, mentalité history, and the history of criticism, LaCapra’s enterprise in providing a critical perspective on contemporary historiography is probably the best in US academia today.

Greeks & Romans

Early Christians

Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christanity (Columbia University Press, 1988). In nineteen chapters, and basing himself on original manuscripts, Peter Brown is very successful in describing attitudes of early Christians towards the body and sexuality. Augustine, in the last chapter, provides the summa of the endless variations of the early Christians and their erring: fulfillment is only achieved in the “city of heaven.” What Christianity has introduced to the Greek and Roman world-views is the duality between mind and body, a dualism we still live with in different forms whether Cartesian or Freudian. The mind “controls” the body, its appetites and drives, hence the mind controls the body’s sexuality. To the early Christians, this meant sexual renunciation and virginity in order to preserve the integrity of the soul. Brown demarcates Roman sexuality from the Christian in his introductory chapters: Roman sexuality looks at women, slaves, and barbarians as inferiors, hence sex with women was riddled with anxieties and it was common for men to have sex with their slaves. Brown, however, does not see Christian renunciation as caused by Roman “tolerance” and he never provides his readers with a sharp answer to the historical causes of Christian asceticism. Instead, he provides us with the variations of the Christian model, and, with this, a view of religion as an agglomeration of infinitesimal efforts comes up, or, in other words, how disparate views become public and create an institution—the Church. Brown also provides an account of a religion—Christianity—as a social movement with no state control. Brown, however, seems locked up in his texts and I would have wished more social history on the Roman family and marriage, the social roots of the early Christians, and the Church and its clergy. Brown’s tone seems also to belong to the 1980s, under the influence of Veyne and Foucault, which looks at sexuality as a discourse, or rather, as a discursive practice.

Medieval Europe

Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago University Press, 1984 [1981 for the French Gallimard edition]). This is a longue durée history of the Purgatory, roughly from early Christianity till the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the Purgatory has achieved a more or less completed structure (even in its poetic form through Dante). Le Goff, however, is eager not to make his history “evolutionary,” that is, he insists that the history of the Purgatory remains unpredictable despite early signs (with Augustine in particular) of a desire to spacialize something between hell and heaven. This creation of an additional space of judgment and repentance shall be expressed differently from one period to another, but by the thirteenth century one thing is certain: the Purgatory integrates well in the European societies where the judicial now plays a dominating and intermediary role between the “body politic” and “society” (or “civil society,” civitas). Le Goff’s method is very much “textual,” and even though he does well in integrating his material with the social trends of each period, one would have wished more social history, in particular for the thirteenth century when several things seem to come together: the political, religious, judicial, and economic.

Modern Europe: Populations, Material life & the Economy

Reddy, William M. The Rise of Market Culture. The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Scott, Joan Wallach. The Glassworkers of Carmaux. French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (1988).

Intellectual Movements in Modern Europe

Latour, Bruno and Steven Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. London: Sage, 1979. A book that belongs to what we now qualify as the new “anthropology of the sciences,” i.e. a discipline (or sub-discipline) that focuses on how the natural hard-core sciences are produced and manufactured within the laboratories, élite teaching colleges, staff recruitment, and the professional journals that transmit and conserve scientific knowledge. A big step from the “idealized” Khunian paradigmatic view of the sciences that became dominant in the last three decades.

Shapin, Steve and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Airpump. Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. In the line of the “anthropology” of Bruno Latour, this book tries to connect the political ideas of the father of “Absolutism” in the Anglo-Saxon world with those of the natural experimental sciences.

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951). The enlightenment within a Kantian perspective. A book that remains a classic.

Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Volume 3 (New York: Norton, 1993). This is the third volume after “Education of the Senses” (1984) and “The Tender Passion” (1986), and is fed by some rich insights. Gay argues that the Victorians were prone to mix cruel aggression and ferocious erotic pleasure; thus our Victorian legacy is a struggle to deal with the joys of aggression. The book also ends with a subtle analysis of the development of “professionalism” and the way all these finer specialties became finely guarded. Unfortunately, the bulk of the book forgets from time to time such rich insights and the reader is left with a bunch of facts that ranges from the very obvious to the sophisticated.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Johns Hopkins, 1980). Ginzburg argues that the heretical thoughts of Menocchio, his sixteenth-century miller, are the effect of an old rural popular culture despite the fact that Menocchio was an avid reader of some medieval texts. In a footnote added later as a response to critics (pp. 154/5), Ginzburg claims a circularity—or complementarity—between élite and popular cultures. Looked upon retrospectively, two decades after the publication of the original Italian edition, which made a sensation, Ginzburg’s thesis on popular culture is neither convincing nor interesting. Going through Ginzburg’s 62 short partitions, one is more puzzled by the Church’s insatiable willingness to force Menocchio “confess” than by popular culture which we can hardly see and perceive.

The French Revolution

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1969. A great classic.

François Furet & Mona Ozouf, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1989). A “dictionary” of the French Revolution organized in thematic and biographic articles.

Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, 1990. Focuses on ideas and their “public” circulation before and after 1789.

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 1955. A great classic by the author of Democracy in America. Tocqueville was among the first to argue that much of what is usually attributed to the Revolution, namely the centralization of the state and its bureaucracy; the advancement of the “bourgeoisie” as a class, etc., were already part of the policy of the old monarchical regime.

Sewell, William H., Jr. Work and Revolution in France. The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. A classic on the French guilds, manufactures and labor force, and the first major historian to apply the Thompsonian problematic to France. An attempt to explain the rise of socialism and the making of the French working class. Sewell chose to highlight the culturalist theme and argued that “socialism” was essentially a cultural reconstruction of an eighteenth-century guild tradition of moral collectivism.

Sonenscher, Michael. Work and Wages. Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Robert Darnton, The Literacy Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).

Barry M. Shapiro, Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789-1790 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), addresses the subject of political crime in the first year of the French Revolution.

de Baecque, Antoine. Le corps de l’histoire. Métaphores et politiques (1770-1800). Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993.

Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (University of California Press, 1992), analyzes the images and familial models that inhabited revolutionary France.

United States

Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), is an excellent introduction to the subject of slavery with an annotated bibliography for further reading.

Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Free Press, 1963 [1913]). First published in 1913, Beard’s radical interpretation brought the Constitution of the United States from its political “idealism” to its economic roots. Scrutinizing the Constitution in light of economic forces, he proposed for the first time that this politico-legal document was shaped by a group of men whose commercial interests were best served by its provisions.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s analysis of the American democratic system remains my favorite in its simplicity and complexity. The “democratic spirit” is traced back to the first Europeans settlers who were suspicious of all the monarchies they had left behind and were thus not that eager to replicate on the new continent political systems which they saw as potentially corrupt because based on rigid hierarchies between individuals, classes, and status groups. Tocqueville then goes on to show that this basic idea of democracy—that all men have the right to be “equal”—is reproduced at every level. Thus, several laws were promulgated in the 17th and 18th centuries in New England and the North-East in particular forbidding large property holdings. In education, this meant the focus on “practical” matters rather than on formal and abstract issues, a major weakness, according to Tocqueville, because it weakens artistic and scientific creativity. The legal system is analyzed in terms of the “power of judges” to overrule previous decisions and interpret the Constitution (another particularity of the American system is that a singles Constitution frames both the political and judicial). But the greatness of American democracy has its dark side too, and in a concluding chapter, Tocqueville is more than cautious about a type of democracy, which despite all its merits, also creates simple-minded individuals and mediocre spirits who have no choice but to leave “government” to a group of professionals.

J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832. Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge University Press, 1994). One of the latest attempts in the search for “a deeper understanding of the causes” of the Revolution. Clark makes three general claims: (i) that the years between 1776 and 1787 gave rise to a new dissenting conception of liberty which was the principal source of the ideas of popular sovereignty that some colonists employed against the traditional idea of absolute sovereignty; (ii) that 1776 may be understood as a revolution of natural law against common law; (iii) that the American Revolution was in essence “a rebellion by groups within Protestant Dissent against an Anglican hegemony.”

Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics. Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 1994). Ever wondered the influence of Greece and Rome on the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution? The addiction of the Founders to classical allusion has never been denied, but in the work of many recent historians its importance has been questioned. Richard’s book is a refutation of such doubts. It was in America that the historical and the legendary figures of antiquity could serve as real models for conduct rather than oratorical embellishment. Though Greece and Rome were equal partners in the colonial educational curriculum, it was to the Roman republic that the Founders turned for a model when they came to frame their constitution. Athenian democracy, criticized by Thucydides, condemned by Plato and disapproved of by Aristotle, inspired in them a fear of the tyranny of the majority. They favored instead what they believed was the “mixed government” of the great days of Rome, the era of the Second Punic War. Should we then be surprised that very few people participate in the democratic process today?

Music & The Arts

Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler. A Musical Physiognomy (Chicago University Press, 1993). A major study by one of the leading Frankfurt School giants that focuses on one of the most important Viennese musicians at the turn of this century. Adorno shows that Mahler’s music is the expression, in its artistic form, of the “end” of the false “totalities” that he found in metaphysics (by contrast, Beethoven would look very much Hegelian). Knowledge of Mahler’s nine symphonies is, of course, a must for understanding Adorno’s analysis. For a broader account of modern music see Adorno’s Quasi Una Fantasia. Essays on Modern Music (Verso, 1993).

National Histories

Latest Trends & Fashions

Sexuality

History & The Social Sciences

Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Monique de Saint Martin, et al, Academic Discourse (Oxford: Polity, 1994). The authors make the claim that “academic discourse” is a rare commodity, some kind of “cultural capital,” in the hands of professors-researchers who find it contrary to their interests to propagate and “popularize” especially among students and other faculty members who might not have access to types of discourse unknown to them and who are thus left in the dark on recent trends and discoveries in the arts and social sciences. Unlike other critiques from the political left, the authors argue that universities exert a conservative social influence not by transmitting an intellectual heritage but by failing to transmit it. While the left and the right continue to bicker over whether the academic culture students absorb is too traditional or too radical, Bourdieu and his colleagues question whether students absorb the academic culture at all. Thus, it is quite common for professors either to claim that their students “cannot understand sophisticated theories,” or that it would be better, in a class-context, “to avoid larky expressions and the like,” or to pretend that “they are already ‘familiar’ with such-and-such an approach.” Academic discourse ends up a “cultural capital” in the possession of the happy few who can afford it. The book, written and published in the mid-sixties on the basis of extensive research on the French educational system, needs to be “re-adapted” to an American context. My impression is that in the United States, a particular kind of academic discourse, which borrows extensively from the French gurus (among them Bourdieu, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault), is more common in the Ivy League and the top-twenty-colleges than in other, more provincial, higher education institutions. But even in the Ivy League, it remains to be seen how much of the academic discourse which Bourdieu and his colleagues have in mind is transmitted and “absorbed.”

Labor Histories

Histories of Judicial Systems

The State

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Esprits d’État. Genèse et structure du champs bureaucratique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (96-97 1993): 49-62. A brilliant exposition on the “origins” of the modern European state from a historical and sociological perspectives.

Class Presentations & Discussions	25%
First OR Second Interpretation Exercise	25%
Final Interpretation Exercise	25%
Term Paper	25%