Contemporary Political Theory

Political theory after the seventeenth century is less a settled canon than a running argument about what concepts like sovereignty, representation, rights, and freedom actually mean once you drop them into the messy political contexts that produced them. You'll work through these debates across three arcs, what "contemporary" even signifies, how representation and rights get problematized, and how law, markets, and biopolitics shape the "state of exception", anchored by two midterms, a final, and short reports that push you to write and defend a position. It builds on the introductory political theory sequence and is where you finally treat thinkers as interlocutors in live disputes (ecological crisis, transnational sovereignty, Covid-era critique) rather than figures to summarize.