Political Science Question

Arguably, there are six major political themes that mobilize the attention and passion of the American citizens today: strengthening the democratic process, economic inequality, health care, climate change, immigration and gun regulation. Present your position on four (4) of these issues by using the political wisdom of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Mill, Virginia Held, Nietzsche and Foucault. In your essay, you have to use at least four (4) of them. For the construction of each argument, you should use all of the thinkers you have selected, since some of them may represent a counterargument to your personal assessments. Basically, you have to define your own views first and then check each of them against the four thinkers of your choice. Who would support your view and why? Who would disagree with you and why?

I am not interested in an exhaustive discussion of the policy matter, but on the manner that you are able to articulate a subjective vantagepoint (or objectivize a personal view) by appealing to theoretical constructs.

One way to do it is to start by defining for yourself what motivates your support or opposition to some particular aspect circumscribed by the issues stated above (e.g., taxation of the rich, reestablishing a federal legal framework against racial discrimination, building, the border wall, stopping immigration altogether, allowing only an annual quota of immigrants, Medicare for all, the public option for health insurance, the carbon tax, starting immediately a program of eliminating fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable energy sources, universal background check when buying guns, banning the sale of assault rifles, and so on). Then, you construct your arguments around that particular aspect by using the ideas of the thinkers whom I indicated above.

Another way to do it is to justify the policy preference relative to the topic (strengthening the democratic process, economic inequality, immigration, health care, climate change, immigration). Then, you speculate on whether the four thinkers support or reject your policy preference.

You may wonder: how could some of these people be relevant to our contemporary debates? Yes, the relevance may be hard to find on certain topics such as ‘climate change’ or ‘immigration’ due to the particularities of the age we are living in. Even ‘freedom,’ ‘property,’ ‘gun control’ and ‘health care’ have been understood quite differently during their lifetimes. Nevertheless, though it may be difficult to speculate on these issues, this is actually the point (remember our discussion on hermeneutics of context). Let me just bring to the forefront something that is familiar to you. The political design that we use today has been crafted by people who studied Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and many, many others. None of these thinkers’ ideas addressed the specific reality of the 1770s and beyond. However, they provided a wealth of wisdom and an intellectual platform for the creation of a new political society. It allowed the Founding Fathers not only to speculate on how would these thinkers deal with one problem or another, but also to justify their own choices by appealing to their wisdom. When Woodrow Wilson created the League of Nations after the First World War and Franklin Delano Roosevelt sketched in the last years of the Second World War the institutions of international cooperation that we have today (United Nations, International Monetary Fund, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) they were both intellectually informed by Kant’s Perpetual Peace.

Mandatory Editorial Requirements

1. The essay should be: 6 to 8 pages long (9 to 10 if you feel inspired), 1.5 spaced, 1-inch left margin, font 12
2. Please send the completed essay in Word format
3. The essay must have a TITLE.
4. Be imaginative but not dreamful. Be creative, but do not get yourself lost in excessive aesthetics. Be daring and authentic, but do not disregard consistency and logic. The latter may not be the antonyms of the former but they are usually forgotten in the effort one makes to appear bold or genuine. Lastly, be yourself rather than someone you are not.
5. Keep in mind that I am interested in how you make the argument not some academic in some article somewhere. Of course, you are allowed to do some limited factual research.
6. Try to write parsimoniously. Do not repeat definitions given in class, books, or the World Wide Web, but rephrase them and present them only if this is absolutely necessary. Do not abusively use quotations, but let me know from your writing that you actually understand the concepts and the literature in general.
7. Last but not least, treat the subject academically. Start by constructing a hypothesis and then go about demonstrating its validity (i.e. use the deductive method).

For quotations or mere citations, I would kindly ask you to indicate the source in footnotes or endnotes.

The source must be presented as follows:

–For an article in a periodical (such as a journal, newspaper, or magazine): Last Name, First Name (Year of Publication, add month and day of publication for daily, weekly, or monthly publications). “Title of article.” Title of periodical, Volume, Number, pages.

–For a book: Last Name, First Name (Year of Publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Location: Publisher: Page number(s).

–For a web page: Last Name, First Name (Date of Publication or Revision). Title of full work [online]. Retrieved month, day, year, from source. Web site: URL.

–For the course notes: Maier, Romulus. Lecture Title: Slide number.

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