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TOPICS COURSE DESCRIPTIONS: GO 251A, 351B and 367

GO 251A: States, Markets and Politics in Developing Countries Professor Feryaz Ocakli

Why are some countries more developed than others? Some countries in the Global South have achieved impressive levels of development, while others have stagnated or went from boom to bust. Most developing countries have experimented with both state-led and free-market approaches to economic policy. Today, hybrid approaches -- notably those of China and Brazil -- are challenging old theories of develop-ment. What explains the striking differences in economic policy and performance across low and middle income countries? These differ-ences impact not only the lives billions of people who live in the developing world, but also influence the global political and economic system.

This course examines states and markets in a comparative perspective with a special focus on developing countries. It introduces concepts, theoretical perspectives, and key issues that constitute the field of political economy of development. The first part of the course explores the shifting role of states and markets in development policy since before the Great Depression. The second part brings together multiple viewpoints to examine the key actors in the Global South, the current phase of globalization, the growing competitiveness of some devel-oping countries such as Brazil, India, China, Russia and Turkey, and the causes of stagnation in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Prerequisite: GO 103 or permission of instructor.

GO 351B: The Political Thought of Aristophanes Professor Tim Burns

Aristophanes’ ribald comedies abound with political themes and characters. We will examine those themes and characters with a view to uncovering Aristophanes’ answers to some fundamental, permanent questions of human existence. Aristophanes lived in an Ath-ens that had, since Themistocles, been moving from a regime of ancestral piety toward a secular empire grounded in human reasoning and deliberation. As a vigorous opponent of war, Aristophanes stands against that move, and the conclusions of many of his plays appear to suggest or encourage a conservative disposition toward ancestral piety or the rule of ancestral, divine law. While this first impression is not entirely misleading, a careful examination of the plays suggests a more complicated and revealing picture. Aristophanes actually disagrees fundamentally with the pious proponents of an ancestral way of life, who prove to be representative of a fundamental human delusion. Yet Aristophanes may see that delusion as inescapable for political life, complicating his comic presentation of what he takes to be true.

We will begin with the play that Aristophanes considered his wisest, The Clouds , and its presentation of the Socratic argument for the necessities of nature over and against claims about divine justice, as well as the arguments of the Just and Unjust Speech as they further articulate that theme. We then look more closely at that theme in the Acharnians , whose central character turns out to be Aristopha-nes himself disguised as a rustic and who (rather selfishly) secures a separate peace for himself and his erotic companions. We then turn to the Knights , in which Aristophanes boldly attacks Cleon. We will attempt to discern why and to what extent Aristophanes judges the gen-tlemanly, peace-loving, pro-Spartan party of Nicias superior to the angry Cleon and his war party, and the perennial, serious issue about politics and anger that is disclosed in that judgment. We will also attempt to discern what is it about democracy, according to Aristophanes, that gives rise to a Cleon, and whether there is anything that Cleon sees that his aristocratic enemies fail to see.

In the second part of the course, we will turn first to the Thesmaphoriazusae , in an attempt to understand Aristophanes’ critique of Euripides’ poetry as open impious and manifestly unfair to women. We will then examine the Frogs , in which the god of comic poetry, Dionysus, descends to Hades and presides there in judgment over the poetry of Euripides and Aeschylus. We will attempt to understand the precise reasons for Dionysus’ choice of Aeschylus’ high or aristocratic tragedy over the low or democratic tragedy of Euripides, and the ramifications of this judgment for understanding Aristophanes’ own plays.

In the final part of the course will look at three “utopian” plays of Aristophanes: the Peace , the Birds , and the Wealth , with an eye to discerning Aristophanes’ teaching about the divine. In the Peace , an Aristophanes stand-in flies to heaven on a dung beetle to de-mand of Zeus an end to the war, and ends up bringing about peace for all the Greeks on his own and against the explicit orders of Zeus. In the Birds , a hyper-Alcibiades takes over heaven by cutting off the gods’ supply of sacrifices and becomes himself the quasi-divine ruler of a new city. In the Wealth , Zeus’ rule is overthrown by humans’ restoration of sight to a being named “Wealth;” the seeing Wealth is able to make the just and only the just wealthy, which causes everyone to become just. In all three plays, Aristophanes presents the overthrow of the rule of Zeus as healthy for political life. Does Aristophanes think that the gods can indeed be overthrown, i.e., that humans can come to live without belief in them? If so, how? If not, why not? Finally, we will consider what Aristophanes’ plays tell us about his understanding of erotic longing and political life, a topic which appears to be so central to Socratic inquiry and on which Socrates and Aristophanes are famously presented by Plato as in significant disagreement.