Session 1: Topic: Introduction to the Course Description: Introduction: Social Theory from the Enlightenment to the Post-Enlightenment; our precarious 21st century; syllabus, grading and course expectations Reading: Elliott, 1-18; Jonathan Haidt’s “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” (2022) Master’s: n/a Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 2: Topic: Enlightenment Social Theory in the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel Description: The ontological presuppositions of social contract theory (Hobbes, Locke); Rousseau’s critique of society; Kant’s “transcendental” and “critical” philosophy and its implications for ontology, ethics and society; Hegel’s appropriation of Kant’s transcendentalism; Hegel’s dialectical method and theory of society Reading: Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”; Selection from Marx and Engel’s “Bourgeois and Proletarians” (from The Communist Manifesto) Master’s: Selection from Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” (“Society and the Individual”); Selection from Kant’s “Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals”; Hegel’s “Absolute Freedom and Terror” (from Phenomenology of Spirit) Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 3: Topic: Challenging the Enlightenment: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud; Weber, Durkheim and Modern Sociology Description: Marx’s “dialectical materialism”; Nietzsche’s “archeology” and “genealogy” of morality; Nietzsche’s response to the problem of nihilism; Freud and the discovery of the “unconscious”; Weber and Durkheim’s foundational contributions to sociology Reading: Elliot, 20-41; Selection from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (“The Madman”); selection from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (“Against Conventional Morality”); selection from Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents; Master’s: Selection from Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 4: Topic: Heidegger, Arendt and Existential Phenomenology Description: Why Heidegger?; Existential phenomenological analysis and its application to social theory; Heidegger’s legacy; Arendt on 20th century totalitarianism Reading: “Martin Heidegger” (from Melchert and Morrow’s The Great Conversation); (Optional: Arendt’s “Vita Activa”) Master’s: Selection from Heidegger’s Being and Time (“Being-in-the-World as Being-with and Being a Self: The “They”) Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 5: Topic: Frankfurt School Critical Theory Description: Frankfurt School critical theory: Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm; The Frankfurt School’s appropriation of Marxist, Psychoanalytical and Existential Phenomenological method; Marcuse on “one dimensionality” and “total administration” Reading: Elliott, 43-74; Selection from Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man”; Adorno’s “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” Master’s: Adorno’s “Culture Industry Revisited”; Selection from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 6: Topic: Discussion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (, directed by Raoul Peck) (Students must watch this film prior to our class discussion) Description: Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin on race and social justice; Applied existential phenomenology and critical theory Reading: Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 7: Midterm Exam

Session 8: Topic: The Structuralist Turn and the Discursive Unconscious: The Structural, Existential, Phenomenological and Post-Structural Psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan Description: Structuralism: Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes; Lacan’s eclectic methodology; The 3 registers of the Lacanian psyche (“imaginary,” “symbolic,” and “real”); Lacan’s “four discourses”; The Lacanian seminars and their influence on the French intellectual world Reading: Elliott, 78-96, 120-129; Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the ‘I’ Function”; (Optional: Selection from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics; Selection from Barthes’s Mythologies; Lacan’s “The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real”) Master’s: Lacan’s “The Function and Field of Language and Speech in Psychoanalysis” (Optional: Selection from Claude Levi-Strauss (TBD)) Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 9: Topic: Interpellation, Panopticism, Power and the Subject Description: Althusser’s synthesis of Marx and Lacan; “ideological and repressive state apparatuses”; “Interpellation” and “subjectivation”; Foucault on the modern subject; the Enlightenment and disciplinary power; “panopticism” Reading: Elliott, 96-112; “The Eye of Power” (Interview with Foucault); (Optional: Foucault’s “The Subject and Power”), Selection from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (“Panopticism”) Master’s: Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”; (Optional: Foucault’s “Discourse on Language”) Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 10: Topic: Poststructuralism: Deconstruction and Community; Description: Derrida on “difference,” the “metaphysics of presence” “grammatology” and “community”; Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis”; Lyotard on “the postmodern condition”; Baudrillard, “simulacra,” and “the desert of the real”; Responses to postmodernism by Jameson and Zizek Reading:; Elliott, 129-131, 135-145, 259-294; (Optional: “Deconstruction in a Nutshell” (A roundtable interview with Derrida)) Master’s: Selection from Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition”; Selections from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus; (Optional: Selection from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations; Jameson’s “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”) Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 11: Topic: Structuration, Habitus, System, Democracy Description: Giddens on “structuration”; Bourdieu and “habitus”; Habermas’s defense of the Enlightenment and democracy; Luhmann’s “systems theory” Reading: Elliott, 148-179, 182-210 (Optional: Habermas’s “The Public Sphere”; Hudson’s “Social Theory Without Reason: Luhmann and the Challenge of Systems Theory: An Interview with Niklas Luhmann”) Master’s: Habermas’s “An Alternative to the Philosophy of the Subject (Optional: Selection from Luhmann’s Introduction to Systems Theory (Chapter 5: “Psychic and Social Systems”); Selection from Bourdieu’s Distinction) Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 12: Topic: Feminism and Patriarchy Description: Beauvoir’s existential phenomenology of the feminine; Kristeva’s feminist semiotics; Irigaray’s psychoanalysis of “phallocentrism”; Butler’s “gender performativity” Reading: Elliott, 213-255; Selection from Butler’s Gender Trouble (“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”) Master’s: Irigaray’s “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine” Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Topic: “Networks, Risks, Liquids,” “Globalization” and “The Digital Revolution: Posthumanism and Beyond” Discussion of The Social Dilemma (film, 2020, directed by Jeff Orlowski) (Students must watch this film prior to our class discussion) Description: On becoming the products of our technologies and economies; Baumann on “liquid modernity” and Beck on “the risk society’; Castells on “network societies” and “flows”; Review for Final Exam Reading: Elliott, 281-290, 375-404; (Optional: Elliott, 298-337, 339-374; Selection from Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (Forward: “On Being Light and Liquid”); Bauman’s “Migration and Identities in the Globalized World”; Beck’s “Global Risk Society” (interview)) Master’s: Selection from Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (Chapter 1: “Emancipation”) Required Film: The Social Dilemma (Dir. Orlowski, 2020) Assignments/deadlines: n/a

Session 14: Final Exam