Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, Lehman College/Nihilism in Germany (Spring 2014)/Course description

Course description

Today Germany is one of the most advanced nations in the world, an industrial powerhouse and leading exporter, and the de facto leader of the European Union—but it was not always this way. This course will focus on German politics and culture in the period between World War I and II. We will begin with an analysis of the concept of “nihilism” and the historical development of the concept in the context of German history from the late 19th through the early 20th century. Many of the thinkers associated with nihilism are German, and the bleak and tragic history of Germany in this century only emphasizes this. The devastating experiences of the First World War (1914-1918), the psychological trauma of losing the war, economic depression, hyper-inflation, revolution, and the rise of Nazism all contributed to a unique cultural perspective that still has value today, even though it is challenging and disturbing.

All of the misery and despair, perhaps not surprisingly, contributed to a very vibrant artistic scene that combined revolutionary new artistic techniques like photomontage and film with a revolutionary message that urged for a radical break with a culture that had led to militarism and war. Germans were forced to confront a sense of emptiness brought on by a dehumanizing scientific rationality. Forced to confront hard questions of the superiority of Western civilization and progress, the answer to these questions remains a part of culture and politics today.

This course combines an interdisciplinary focus on humanities and social science: political science, history, and philosophy, mainly and to a lesser extent: sociology, economics, psychology, media studies, art history, and cultural studies. We will also utilize technology like "blogs" and "wikis" to complete assignments.

http://nihilismlehman.blogspot.com/

As part of the course, students will select an article from Wikipedia to edit related to this course. The process of completing this assignment will be broken down into parts:

Choose something from one of the online or class lectures that interests you and search for it on Wikipedia.
If there is no article or if the article is relatively short this might be a good topic to choose. If you are not sure about a topic let me know.
Start researching the topic. The reading list on the syllabus and links through the blog can be used for research. Many books and articles on the syllabus can be downloaded online, but some you might have to go to the library for. Some books might be too long to read for the semester, literature reviews can be a good substitute. If you search for book titles on JSTOR or Academic Search you can usually find short reviews of these books.
Complete a bibliography. It should follow Modern Language Association (MLA) format. The reading list on the syllabus is in MLA format, with the exception MLA bibliography has last name followed by first name, otherwise the formatting on the syllabus is the same. A minimum of five sources should be good, made up of books, articles, and you can use websites as well.
Start creating or editing the article on Wikipedia. For this you will need to sign in to your Wikipedia account. If you have not done so already please create your account name, and "enroll" in the wikipage for the class.

Learning outcomes

To gather, interpret, and assess information from a variety of sources and points of view.

The interdisciplinary structure of the course permits a wide array of sources and media to be incorporated in the lectures and the student's work, including: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, film, photography, and literature, both fiction and non-fiction, the latter including works in political science, sociology, history, and philosophy.

To evaluate evidence and arguments critically and be able to appraise their usefulness.

The course is structured around a central idea, nihilism, which the students use to interpret the various cultural, political, and economic sources used in the class. All readings and sources are referred back to its specific historical context, and the students are asked to relate these ideas to the present through weekly assignments where they analyze and interpret a specific selection from the readings that they choose. Finally, a diverse set of viewpoints and ideologies are incorporated and analyzed ranging from political ideologies and movements: liberalism, conservatism, fascism, communism, social-democracy; to cultural and civil rights issues like racism, anti-Semitism, feminism and LGBT rights; to various counter-culture movements, like dadaism, expressionism, and Marxist humanism.

To produce well-reasoned written or oral arguments using evidence to support conclusions.

Students are expected to create their own blog and post assignments regularly using various online resources as well as provide feedback for the other student's blog postings. Students are also expected to create or revise an article on Wikipedia relevant to the course, and requiring a higher standard of research (using the library as opposed to online resources) and a more developed scaffolding process than blogging.

To demonstrate familiarity with methods of theoretical or abstract analysis and philosophical reasoning.

The course will emphasize a historical institutionalist analysis of Germany between World War I and World War II by isolating the variables leading to outcomes like the fall of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism, the beginning of World War II and the Holocaust. Students will be exposed to philosophical reasoning in the context of debate between Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School. Students will also be exposed to various aesthetic and psychoanalytic theories related to painting, film, photography, etc, and be asked to analyze and critique them in assignments.

To understand the role of theoretical and abstract reasoning in society and public policy or public concerns in which ethics or other aspects of philosophy play a role.

The course stresses the sociological bases of knowledge and intends to develop a reflexive self-awareness in the students of their own values and opinions. The interdisciplinary and multimedia structure of the course breaks down the arbitrary barriers separating the various academic disciplines allowing for a more in depth and concrete experience of the topic under analysis. This, in turn, will allow the students to connect organically what they learn in class to their real lives. Assignments are intended to help develop participatory skills in an online setting, first by developing basic competencies using information technology (IT), and then by learning to interact with others using this media and to utilize its potential for educational purposes.

To produce an essay or written piece of research or other creative work, in “scaffolded” stages, demonstrating both an ability to express complex ideas for an educated audience as well as the ability to evaluate and utilize a variety of information of an abstract, theoretical or philosophical nature.

The students will create several blog postings throughout the semester which will require them to analyze philosophical, political, and aesthetic ideas and to incorporate pictures, music, and other multimedia. The students will create and edit an article on Wikipedia that is broken down into a scaffolding process: choose a topic, complete a bibliography using reputable sources, complete a draft of the article and get feedback before completing the final project.

Timeline

Part 1

2/1 Introduction: Nihilism and its Origins

Recommended Reading

Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York: Oxford University Press, 1944

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Penguin Classics, 1976

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, [1887] 1998

Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Peter Gay, New York: Random House, 2000

Merteen B. ter Borg, "The Problem of Nihilism: A Sociological Approach, Sociological Analyses, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring 1988)

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1923] 1972

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978

2/8: Expressionism, Dadaism, New Objectivity (Neue Sachtlichkeit); Hugo Ball, "Dada Manifesto"

Recommended Reading

Ernst Bloch, "Discussing Expressionism," in Rodney Livingstone (trans.), Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, New York: Verso, 2007

Georg Lukács, "Realism in the Balance," in Livingstone, Aesthetics and Politics

Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1965

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, [1790] 1987

2/15: Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Recommended Reading

G.W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, New York: Oxford University Press, [1807] 1977

Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Edwin Curley (trans.), The Collected Writings of Spinoza, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1677] 1985

Eknath Easwaran (trans.), The Upanishads, Tomales, CA: The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, 2000

Barbara Stoler Miller (trans.), The Bhagavad Gita, New York: Bantam Classics, 2004

Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1949] 1953

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, [1968] 1995

Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan Riddick, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, [1979] 2011

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne, Mineloa, NY: Dover Publications, [1818] 1966

2/22: Expressionism: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Film)

Recommended Reading

Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, New York: Routledge, 2001

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum, [1947] 1972

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books, [1967] 1994

Thomas Elsaessar, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary, New York: Routledge, 2000

Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1973] 1996

Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1947] 2004

Dietrich Scheunemann, Expressionist Film: New Perspectives, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003

3/1: Expressionism: The Blue Angel (Film)

Recommended Reading

Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Uncensored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor Books, 1959

Colin Hearfield, Adorno and the Modern Ethos of Freedom, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor, New York: Cambridge University Press, [1785] 1997

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Alan Wood, New York: Cambridge University Press, [1781] 1999

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor and Andrews Reath, New York: Cambridge University Press, [1788] 1997

David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles Hendel, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, [1748] 1995

Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon, 1984

3/8: Expressionism: M (film)

Recommended Reading

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth, ed. Ian Shapiro, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1651] 2010

Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, New York: Harper Perennial [1942] 2008

Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, New York: Routledge, [1900] 1973

Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. David Carr, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1936] 1970

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, [1927] 1996

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, [1943] 1948

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, New York: Humanities Press, [1945] 1962

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Books I-XXVII, trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sachehaye, Chicago, IL: Open Court, [1916] 1983

Louis Althusser et al, Reading Capital, New York: New Left Books, [1968] 1970

Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller, Oxford, UK: Blackwell, [1970] 2002

Part 2

3/15: The German Revolution of 1919: Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet,” Ch. 1 and 8; “What Does the Spartacus League Want?”

Recommended Reading

Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, New York: Vintage Books, [1938] 1965

Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Atlanta, GA: Pathfinder Press, 1986

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978, pp. 469-501

Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979

Jack Goldstone, "Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory," Annual Review of Political Science, 4: 139-87, 2001

Goldstone, "Understanding the Revolutions of 2011: Weakness and Resilience in Middle Eastern Autocracies," Foreign Affairs, (May/June 2011)

Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007

Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1977

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, [1971] 2007

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1923] 1972

3/22: The Weimar Republic, “The Weimar Constitution”

Recommended Reading

Juan Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978

Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978

Samuel Huntington, "Political Order and Political Decay," World Politics, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Apr. 1965) pp. 386-430

Rudolf Heberle, From Democracy to Nazism: A Regional Case Study on Political Parties in Germany, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, [1945] 1970

William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945, New York: Franklin Watts, [1965] 1984

Sheri Berman, "Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic," World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Apr. 1997) pp. 401-29

Thomas Ertman, "Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar Western Europe Revisited," World Politics, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Apr. 1998) pp. 475-505

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, New York: First Perennial Classics, [1835] 2000

Plato, The Republic, "Book VIII," trans. Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books, 1991

Robert Putnam, with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993

Sidney Tarrow, "Making Social Science Work Across Space and Time: A Critical Reflection on Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work," American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 2, (Jun. 1996), pp. 389-97

Karl Deutsch, "Social Mobilization and Political Development," American Political Science Review, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Sept. 1961), pp. 493-514

3/29: Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

Recommended Reading

Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966

Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992

Gregory Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy: Social Classes and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006

Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1964] 1977

Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York: Oxford University Press, 1944

Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1922] 1978

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, New York: Cambridge University Press [1820] 1991

Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 169-91

Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975

Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, New York: Verso, 1974

Michael Mann, "The Autonomous Power of the State," Archives de Européenes de Sociologie, Vol. 25, No. 19, (1984), pp. 185-213

Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997

Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays, Westport, CT: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962

4/5: Nazism: The Triumph of the Will (Film); Night and Fog (film)

Recommended Reading

William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945, New York: Franklin Watts, [1965] 1984

Sheri Berman, "Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic," World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 3 (April 1997) pp. 401-29

Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1942

Friedrich Pollock, "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations," Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Bronner and Douglas Kellner, New York: Routledge, 1989

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism, New York: CSE Books, 1978

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Schocken Books, 1951

Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion, New York: Verso, 2002

Juan Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum, [1947] 1972

Part 3

4/12: Ernst Jünger, “On Pain”

Recommended Reading

Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," in trans. H.B. Nisbet, Political Writings, New York: Cambridge University Press, [1795] 1991

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, [1927] 1996

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, New York: Humanities Press, [1945] 1962

José Ortega y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. Pedro Blas Gonzales, New York: Algora Publishing, [1930] 2007

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Atkins, New York: Oxford University Press, [1926] 1991

Arnold Tonybee, A Study of History, Vol I-XII, New York: Oxford University Press, [1961] 1987

Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, New York: Random House, 2005

Max Abrahms, "What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy," International Security, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Spring 2008)

Martha Crenshaw, "The Causes of Terrorism," Comparative Politics, Vol. 13, No. 4 (July 1981)

Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, San Francisco, CA: City Lights, [1957] 1986

4/26:Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” The Great Dictator (Film)

Recommended Reading

Walter Benjamin, "Conversations with Brecht," trans. Anya Bostock, and "Reply," trans. Harry Zohn, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, New York: Verso, 2007

Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," trans. John Heckman, New Left Review 62, July-August 1970, pp. 83-96

Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968

Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Schocken Books, 1978

Theodor Adorno, "Letters to Walter Benjamin," trans. Francis McDonagh, in Aesthetics and Politics

5/3 Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History"

Recommended Reading

James Joyce, Ulysses, New York: Oxford University Press, [1922] 1993

J.G. Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, ed. Kenneth Haynes, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, New York: Penguin, 1988

Hannah Arendt, "Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940", in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1968

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum, [1947] 1972

Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1, trans. John Moore, New York: Verso, [1947] 1991

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Basil Blackwell, [1974] 1991

Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007