| Social Sciences 1 - Society, Culture, and Personality
This course concerns the relationship of the individual human being to the society of which he or she is a member. By critically studying this relationship, we ask whether the individual is really free or is determined by society’s norms, and whether these norms themselves might be a product of individual or social creation. Other considerations in the course include the development of personality and the role of culture. (Prerequisite: Integrative Studies 1) Reading List Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child
Lawerence Kohlberg, "Moral Stages and Moralization"
Nancy Chodorow, "Family Structure and Feminine Personality"
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice
Émile Durkheim, Suicide
Karl Marx, selections
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Social Sciences 2 - The Western Political Tradition Social Sciences 2 concerns political judgment and the values which underpin it. The search for the “good life” through politics has been a human quest since antiquity. One’s education as a citizen of the state is the foundation of the classical formulation of a liberal arts education. The central objective of this course is the education of such citizens, those who participate through public judgment in shaping the political world. Such an education requires an understanding of the founding documents of the American political system as well as other seminal works of Western thought.
Reading List Plato, "Republic"
Aristotle, Politics
St. Thomas Aquinas, "Treatise on Law"
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract
The United States Declaration of Independence
The United States Constitution
The Federalist Papers
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
CHarles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Sprit of the Laws
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women
Social Sciences 3 - Modern Theories of State and Society
Social Science 3 aims at further understanding of the conceptual content of the social sciences and how such concepts have been applied in modern social and political life. The course features nineteenth and twentieth century works which suggest various ways of comprehending the social, psychological, economic, and political structure of the modern world. (Prerequisite: Social Sciences 1 and 2) Reading List Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands
Karl Marx, selections
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Alexis de Tocqueville, On Democracy in America
Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right
Social Sciences 4 - Methodology of the Social sciences This final course in the Social Sciences sequence examines the conceptual framework and methodology of the various disciplines of the social sciences. We turn from the examination of the structural and empirical makeup of social and political reality to the modes of inquiry that have been employed in the works read in the previous social sciences courses. All the questions from the earlier courses in the Social Sciences sequence are reexamined in light of what kinds of questions they are, and which answers to such questions can claim scientific validity.
Reading List Max Weber, selections
Émile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Sandra Harding, ed., Feminism and Methodology
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia
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