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Course Info for POLS - 383 - 01, Spring 2025
Class number: 2876 Title: Assembly, Empire and Utopia Department: Political Science
Career: Undergraduate Component: Lecture Session: Regular
Instructor's Permission Required: No Grading Basis: Regular Units: 1.00
Enrollment limited to 19 Current enrollment: 15 Available seats: 4
Start date: Tuesday, January 21, 2025 End date: Friday, May 9, 2025 Mode of Instruction: In Person
Schedule: MW: 2:55PM-4:10PM, MC - 303 Instructor(s): Litvin, Boris
Prerequisite(s): None
Distribution Requirement: Meets Social Sciences Requirement
Course Description:
This course examines the perspectives, problems, and disagreements that occupied Athenian democracy as it changed from the 6th to 4th centuries BCE. Doing so, this course proposes that current-day students of politics benefit from critically reassessing questions examined by ancient Athenian thinkers. These include the following: how do we distinguish public and private life? What makes a community powerful? What is the place of discord in political life? What is the nature of justice, and what is its relationship to democracy? Interrogating these questions, we focus on close readings of Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle in conversation with contemporary commentaries.