Political Concepts

A senior-level seminar that treats the basic vocabulary of politics—democracy, the state, representation, ideology, revolution, rights—not as settled definitions but as contested ideas with histories worth excavating. Working primarily from Ball, Farr and Hanson's *Political Innovation and Conceptual Change*, you read one canonical essay per concept each week and come prepared to argue about it, with two midterms and a final testing how well you can think through these terms rather than recite them. The payoff, after a degree's worth of empirical political science, is learning to see how the words we use to describe politics quietly shape what we can see in it.