Recently Taught Courses
- Models of Democracy (with J. Fishkin) Ancient and modern varieties of democracy; debates about their normative and practical strengths and the pathologies to which each is subject. Focus is on participation, deliberation, representation, and elite competition, as values and political processes. Formal institutions, political rhetoric, technological change, and philosophical critique. Models tested by reference to long- term historical natural experiments such as Athens and Rome, recent large-scale political experiments such as the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, and controlled experiments.
- High Stakes Politics (with Barry Weingast) Normative political theory combined with positive political theory to better explain how major texts may have responded to and influenced changes in formal and informal institutions. Emphasis is on historical periods in which catastrophic institutional failure was a recent memory or a realistic possibility. Case studies include Greek city -states in the classical periodand the northern Atlantic community of the 17th and 18th centuries including upheavals in England and the American Revolutionary era.
- Political Economy of the Greek World (with Joe Manning) Two-part course. Did large-scale kingdoms radically change the Greek world after Alexander; or had new conditions already emerged from the Peloponnesian War? Continuities and discontinuities across the classical/hellenistic divide. Focus is on states and economies in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.E. Sources include primary sources and recent scholarship on Greek economic thought and practices with reference to city states (Athens, Rhodes), federations (Achaean, Aetolian), and empires (Ptolemaic, Seleukid).
- Origins of Political Thought. Political philosophy in classical antiquity, focusing on canonical works of Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Historical background. Topics include: political obligation, citizenship, and leadership; origins and development of democracy; and law, civic strife, and constitutional change.
- Ethics for Political Animals. The ancient Greek conception of ethics as arising from human social and political nature. Problems related to values, identity, and responsibility. Topics include civic friendship, equality, reciprocity, integrity, dignity, and legal obedience.
- Collective Action in Classical Athens. How can a collectivity reap the social benefits of cooperation in the face of the tendency of self-seeking individuals to defect? The problem is pressing in democracies, which require cooperation by diverse persons, and in highly competitive environments such as the classical Greek city states. Focus is on the organizational design of classical Athens as a state; how political institutions served to organize useful social and technical knowledge.
