Fall/Winter Timetable
POL2006H1S L0101
Undergraduate Course Code: POL460H1S L0101
Studies in Modern Political Theory
Public Reason, Deliberation, and the Democratic Public Sphere
Themes
How should citizens and politicians be talking to each other in the public sphere about public issues? Why is this question important indeed more important than how citizens and politicians vote? These are the core questions we will investigate in this course. We will begin with the philosophical answers to these questions and end with some practical challenges faced by all democratic publics. The work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas will serve as our philosophical starting point. From these two theorists we will reconstruct an ideal of public justification and democratic legitimacy that gives primacy to reason and reason giving. We will then move through some concrete cases, in particular we will investigate the appropriate place of religion, passion, rhetoric and the media in public debate as well as post colonial challenges to the idea of reason embedded in theories of public justification and deliberation.
Texts
TBA
Format and Requirements
One two-hour seminar per week. Course requirements: a shorter and longer essay and a take home test.
November 14, 2023
Congratulations to Madalyn Hay, a recipient of a 2023-2024 Connaught PhDs for Public Impact Fellowship. Madalyn, one of our doctoral students, holds a BAH in Contemporary Studies and Classics from the...
August 24, 2023
Congratulations to alumna Meaghan Williams, a recipient of the 2022-23 Governor General’s Gold Medal for Academic Excellence, the highest academic honour available to graduate students in Canada. Awarded annually by the Office of the...
June 14, 2021
Great news from the Canadian Political Science Association, which held its annual awards ceremony (online) over the weekend of June 12 & 13: Professor Stefan Rencken’s book "Private Governance and Public...
April 22, 2021
Congratulations to two political science alumni now teaching at U of T who have both won Superior Teaching Awards! Igor Shoikhedbrod and Khalid Ahmed will be celebrated on May 5th at...
August 6, 2020
Q&A with 2020 Vanier Scholar Yojana Miraya Oscco Congratulations to PhD student Yojana Miraya Oscco who has won a prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC). Launched in 2008, the program enables...
April 30, 2020
Congratulations to our graduate student Kevin Edmonds who has won New College's June Larkin Award for Pedagogical Development. A PhD candidate specializing in Caribbean political economy, histories of alternative/illicit development, foreign intervention and...