WWS 565/Pol 527

STATE,  SOCIETY,  AND

DEVELOPMENT

              The aim of this seminar is to give students a sense of basic options when thinking about development.  To what extent is the state or the market "natural," and when do intellectual and business elites conflict?  Will modern development make all societies democratic?  If so, can traditional/cultural patterns still be identified in this process?  How can women or minority groups exert influence to make development serve everyone?  Under what conditions should political or economic thinking have priority?   What does it mean to do a "systems analysis"?  If that is always different from a "symbolic analysis," how do the two approaches relate to each other?  What should happen, if they imply different solutions to the same problem?  In what kinds of ways do leaders acquire or keep followers?  Under what conditions do social groups (especially ethnic groups and classes) conflict or harmonize?  Is long-term growth mostly a matter of capital, or labor, or responses to bottlenecks, or entrepreneurship, or luck, or some specifiable combination?  Can any current economic theory predict development over a span longer than a few years?  What, if anything, can classics about past change in Europe and North America tell about change in the quickly developing countries now? 

              The instructor pays attention to indigenous not just international sources of development.  Long-term factors and large countries (e.g., China, Indonesia, India, Russia, the US) will be in focus here — and each seminar member can contribute on the basis of whatever regional interests he or she has.  This syllabus will be on the web, but it will also be provided on paper to students who take the course.  The seminar should interest IR specialists, Americanists and other regionalists, as well as students of development and comparative politics.  The syllabus is not as scary as it may look.  The readings are not as onerous as they may seem if you skim the list briefly, because many items on the syllabus are short.  The links between texts for any week show their meaning best; this will become evident in discussions.  We must vet values here; so participation by all is essential to the seminar's success.  The course uses both classic and recent texts to complement other seminars.  

Requirements

              This seminar is for reading and discussion.  The main work is:  studying basic texts, participating in careful oral analysis of them to compare the ideas of our syllabus authors, and offering to the whole seminar short oral and written précis of other texts that students themselves will choose.  No final exam will be held, but other means will be found to assure that students can vet major concepts from the texts.  A short end-of-term essay covers a topic of interest to the writer.  Participation and reading will be expected of every person around the table.Normally each student should try to speak several times in each session (with the shy going first).  It is anticipated that each student will refer to syllabus authors at least once during each session.  Live comments are crucial in this seminar, especially when members can be bold enough to reverse the premises of the syllabus readings. 

              These texts raise recurrent, endemic issues of social science.  Most are exceptionally well-written; they are "literature" properly speaking.  For many required texts, the syllabus suggests just a few selected pages that offer sufficient gist.  The size of the seminar must and will be kept small to ensure good discussions.  Graduate students in the WWS, Politics, Sociology, History, and East Asian Studies have enrolled in previous years.  The nub of the course will be careful reading and analysis of very provocative texts.