LOGO

Feminist political philosophy does have its favourite topics – which include gender justice, the politicization of the seemingly private or the debates on pornography or abortion, among others. But the feminist political philosophy cannot be defined by these topics, for it aims at a different kind of political philosophy by incorporating questions concerning the oppression of women because of their gender into its methods of inquiry. The resulting theories are in deliberate tension to a traditional, value-free or neutral idea of science, thus requiring additional reflexivity. By reading classic texts of feminist political philosophy, the seminar intends to analyse both the substantial topics as well as the methodological implications embedded in feminist interventions in political theory. For above all, feminist political philosophy is a politicization of theory.

Prepatory Reading:

Beauvoir, Simone de (1999 [1949]): Das andere Geschlecht. Sitte und Sexus der Frau. Übersetzt von Uli Aumüller und Grete Osterwald. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Becker-Schmidt, Regina/Knapp, Gudrun-Axeli (2011): Feministische Theorien zur Einführung. 5., erg. Aufl. Hamburg: Junius.

Butler, Judith und Joan W. Scott (Hrsg.) (1992): Feminists theorize the political. New York/London: Routledge.

Haraway, Donna 1988: »Situated Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective«, in: Feminist Studies 14. 3, S. 575-599.

Nagl-Docekal, Herta (2010): Feministische Philosophie. In: Becker, Ruth/Kortendiek, Beate (Hrsg.): Handbuch Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, S. 302–311.

Rössler, Beate (1996): »Feministische Theorien der Politik«, in: Klaus von Beyme und Claus Offe (Hrsg.): Politische Theorien in der Ära der Transformation. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 267–291.

In a spectacularly short time, the concept of responsibility has risen from obscurity to prominence: Coined as a political concept in the debates surrounding the democratic revolutions in America and France , it was used to rethink the relation between the government and the people or the government and the parliament. These beginnings as well as the subsequent developments – its individualization in ethics (Max Weber), its usage to cope with an unbearable past after World War II (Karl Jasper), its connection to sustainability (Hans Jonas) and its newest offspring in international relations, the “responsibility to protect” – are the core themes of this seminar.

Prepatory Reading:

Bayertz, Kurt (1995): Eine kurze Geschichte der Herkunft der Verantwortung. In: ders. (Hrsg.): Verantwortung. Prinzip oder Problem? Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 3–71.

McKeon, Richard (1957): The Development and the Significance of the Concept of Responsibility. In: Revue Internationale de Philosophie 39 (1), 3–32.

Weber, Max (1988 [1919]): Politik als Beruf. In: ders.: Gesammelte politische Schriften. Hrsg. Von Johannes Winckelmann. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 505–560.

The relationship between truth and democracy has always been a troubled one: On the one hand, democracy seems to ignore what is true, since democracy is the rule not of truth but of majority. On the other hand, democracy is often seen as a “truth machine”, for it requires deliberation before decision. Both sides still affirm truth as unproblematic, but if we start with democracy instead, too much truth seems equally threatening: for then the rule of the demos turns into the rule of experts, technocracy – or in the rule of truth itself, captured in the image of the philosopher king. And yet, democracy seems bound to the power of truth. So these (and further) dimensions of the problematic relation between truth and democracy will be at the heart of the seminar.

The revival of political philosophy in the 20th century is to no small extended due to the work of John Rawls. Published in 1971, “A Theory of Justice” first offered a conception of justice as fairness that Rawls later works – “Political Liberalism” and “The Law of People” – further developed, refined and generalized to the international sphere. Thirty years later, in “Justice as Fairness: A Restatement”, Rawls integrates his later work systematically into to a restatement of his theory of justice. Thus, this book serves as an ideal entry into Rawls’ thought.

The seminar is designed as a reading class: Although we will of course pay attention to important criticisms and developments, the focus is on reading and discussing Rawls book.

What does Political Theory do – and how? The question shows the difficulty in talking of “methods” in Political Theory, for it already seems hard to name the objects it studies. Because the objects and the methods used to analyze them are internally related, the seminar will have to take up both questions: what methods Political Theory uses and what Political Theory is.

While the first part of the seminar pursues these questions via reading theoretical texts, the second part specifically targets a theme recurrent in all the answers: language. On the one hand, this also means studying theoretical reflections on language within Political Theory. On the other hand, the seminar will try to take up this theme in a practical manner. How to read and write (in) Political Theory?

[Study Program]

Within Jürgen Habermas’ philosophical work, political philosophy is of central importance. Habermas has, however, always reworked both his theoretical fundaments and the answers they provide to questions concerning the rule of law in a democratic state, the connecting between capitalism and democracy or politics beyond the nation-state. His last great theoretical effort produced Between Facts and Norms (1992) which forms the backbone of his current political philosophy. The seminar therefore starts with discussions of selections from Between Facts and Norms, before it focuses on different political questions in Habermas’ more recent writings (such as the future of the European Union or democratic capitalisms/capitalist democracy) and some important objections.

[Study Program]

Power is a fundamental concept of political science – but what is »power«? From the beginning of political thought, power has been repeatedly reconceptualized and has been subject to a long, complex and on-going debate. Because different concepts of power make a profound difference the analysis of political phenomenon, we aim at making this debate accessible. Therefore, we will investigate the different theories of power from thinkers such as Aristotle or Machiavelli to Arendt, Luhmann or Foucault.

If democracy is not simply the name of a institutional type of government, but an endless insurgent against the state (Abensour), the true name of politics as a disruption (Rancière) or an event to which one decides to be faithful (Badiou), then we can speak of an anarchic element within democracy. These (and other) theories of radical democracy highlight a moment of ungovernableness which is said to be constitutive of democracy. From another direction, anarchism has rethought democratic forms of self-organisation which function independent of repressive state-apparatuses.

The seminar will investigate the constitutive anarchy within democracy as well as the democratic potentials within anarchism. The aim is to better understand the relation between democracy and anarchism and thereby this precious and precarious moment of ungovernableness.

Political knowledge might mean very different things: knowledge that is politically dangerous (e.g. because it might damage a rival’s chances in an election campaign), or knowledge that is politically contested (how to do a census, how the poverty report should be published, what records are handed over to an inquiry commission). In addition, it might mean knowledge about politics, whether the knowledge of political actors or the knowledge produced by political science. The seminar has two aims: On the one hand, it will give an overview of the different forms of political knowledge and how they are conceptualized in political theory. On the other hand, the seminar aims to take seriously the self-reflexive dimension of its topic: For when political theory asks about political knowledge it automatically asks about its own doing. But what methods does political theory have to address this task? And what would be a critical theory of political knowledge?