Course Syllabus - POL S 401 A
Spring 2026 Theme: Democracy as a Way of Life
Democracy is usually seen as a mode of government or form of rule, but advocates and critics of democracy alike just as frequently think of it as a social and cultural way of life, a manner of being in the world. Plato called democracy “the most attractive of the regimes . . . like a coat of many colors”; he also worried how democracy toppled the most basic relations of authority. Children defy their parents in a democracy, and students their teachers. Horses and donkeys wander “the streets with total freedom, noses in the air, barging into any passer-by who fails to get out of the way.”
This seminar analyzes democracy as a distinctive way of life as it arose after the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. It begins with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic debates about the meaning of democratic revolution (Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine), segues to the flowering of democratic culture in the United States and its relationship to white supremacy (David Walker, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau), examines the changing meaning of personal agency in mass, industrializing society (John Dewey), and probes the connections between democracy, race, violence, and empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois).
Assigned Books
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Penguin Books, 1985)
David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (University Park: Penn State Press, 2000)
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essential Writings, intr. Mary Oliver (New York: Modern Library, 2000)
John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (Lanham, MD: Prometheus Books, 1999)
Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1892-1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2016)
W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, intr. Kwame Anthony Appiah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)