HS/PO/PH355 - Politics and Philosophy of Power

Politics and philosophy of power is the systematic inquiry into the nature, forms, legitimacy, and effects of power in individual, social and institutional contexts, asking how power is constituted, exercised, justified, controlled, resisted, and embedded in knowledge, norms, and material structures.

This course provides an in-depth study into the history and philosophy of concepts and ideas of power and its institutions. The first part of the course examines power structures in new-age, pre-modern Europe, with its most important theorists of power, Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, both scholars are sons of a society deeply embedded in and impacted by the hegemonic institutions of Church and Aristocracy.

Enlightenment and the rise of a civil society engender new philosophies of power, new theories of the social contract, and the role – and rule – of law. In this section of the course, we will study John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Montesquieu`s The Spirit of Laws and Jean-Jacques Rousseau`s Essay on the Origin of Inequality. The reciprocal relationship between philosophical theory and political action, i.e. in that context the French and American Revolutions, will be intensely discussed. In terms of power relations, we will study and examine the intrinsic entanglement of power relations between subjects and society, and the (invisible) power of culture, class, status and norms in a capitalistic world order.

This course combines European history, philosophy, and political theory and demonstrates how closely these areas are interconnected with each other.

Together, we analyze the phenomenon of power with the power of philosophy!