Political Science 110J

Power in American Society

Course Website

• adamgomez.wordpress.com/teaching/110JFA2010

• All course documents (syllabus, lecture slides, essay prompts, online readings) can be found here

Key terms & ideas

• Ideal types– Abstracted for understanding– Never found in pure form

• Power and authority– Legitimacy

• Sources of Power (broadly):– Force– Economy– Politics

• Sources of Legitimacy:– Law– Culture, religion, custom– Charisma

Two Kinds of Liberty

• Ideal types, almost never encountered in pure form

• Negative– Liberty is having no masters• Absence of constraint

• Positive– Liberty is being your own master• Constraint can be used to help you act as you would if

you had better understanding

Telos

• The end of a thing as a part of that thing– Example: acorns & oak trees

• Teleology (teleological)– Understanding a thing with its telos in mind– Linear movement toward the telos of a thing

• Two major political philosophies inform the structure of American government– liberalism & republicanism

Liberalism

• Emphases:– Primacy of reason– Reason vs. passion, interest– Universal rights– Negative liberty– The market– Individuals

Republicanism

• Emphases– Value of citizenship– Ties that bind citizens to state and vice versa– Community & communal identity– Positive liberty– Virtue and corruption (faction, interest)– Classicalist

• What is power? How do we talk about it?• What does it mean to be free?• What is America? Who is an American?• What is the American telos? Is there one?• Who are we, and what will we do?