Political Culture, Then and Now

Course Syllabus

Professor Jeffrey Goldfarb

Week 1: 1968: Political Culture and Democratic Action

Meetings 3 and 4: Democratic Action
-- Adam Michnik: “A New Evolutionism” in Letters from Prison and Other Essays (PDF)
-- Vaclav Havel: “The Power of the Powerless” (PDF)

-- Jeffrey Goldfarb, “Civil Society ‘As If’” in his After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe (PDF)
-- Tom Hayden, “Port Huron: June 1962” (PDF)
-- James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (PDF)

Week 2: 1989: Political Culture and Democratic Constitution

Meetings 5 and 6: Political Culture and “Modernization”
-- Lucian Pye, “Introduction: Political Culture and Political Development” (PDF)
-- Sidney Verba, “Comparative Political Culture” (PDF)
-- Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural (selections) (PDF)

Meeting 7
-- Jeffrey Goldfarb, “Epilogue: Them and Us,” in his Beyond Glasnost, p.196 –226 (PDF)
-- Jeffrey Goldfarb, “Why is there no feminism after Communism?” in his Civility and Subversion, p. 181 - 202 (PDF)
-- Elzbieta Matynia ed., Grappling with Democracy, p. 11-30, 56 –81, 116 –127, 139 – 156, 209 – 217 (PDF)
-- Elzbieta Matynia, "EnGendering Democracy" (PDF)

Week 3: 2001: Democratic Culture and its Opposites in a New Century

Meetings 8 and 9
-- Raymond Williams, “Defining a Democratic Culture” Resources of Hope, 1 - 38 (PDF)
-- Jurgen Habermas, “Fundamentalism and Terror,” and “Interpreting the Fall of a Monument,” in his The Divided West, p. 1 -36 (PDF)
-- Jeffrey Goldfarb, The Politics of Small Things, p.9 – 22, 51-68 (PDF)

Meetings 10 - 12
-- Jeffrey Goldfarb, “How to Be an Intelligent Anti-American” in The Logos Reader (PDF)
-- Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism, p. 1-47 (PDF) and Ian Buruma, "The Origins of Occidentalism” OR Buruma and Margalit, "Occidentalism", NY Review of Books

-- Edward Said, “Dignity and Solidarity” in his From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (PDF)
-- Edward Said, “Orientalism 25 Years Later”

-- Jan T. Gross, “Neighbors,” The New Yorker (PDF)
In The Neighbors Respond, the following pieces:
-- “Interview with the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, on the Murder of Jews in Jedwabne” (PDF)
-- Stanislaw Musial, ”We Ask You to Help Us Be Better” (PDF)
-- Aleksander Kwasniewski, “Address by President of Poland” (PDF)
-- Adam Michnik, “Poles and the Jews: How Deep the Guilt?” and Michnik and Leon Wieseltier, “Exchange” (PDF)

-- David Shulman, Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, p.144-220 (PDF)
-- Raja Shehadeh, Strangers in the House, p.140-7 (PDF)
-- David Grossman, The Yellow Wind, p.114- 126 (PDF)
-- David Grossman, Sleeping on a Wire, p. 250 – 261 (PDF)
-- Miko Peled, “Transforming Israel”
-- Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” The New York Review of Books
-- Tony Judt, “An Alternative Future: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books