Making Sense of Contemporary Political Theory

Three ways of telling the story of the past eight decades

My course on “Contemporary Political Theory” at Penn is drawing to a close next Tuesday, but I actually held my last lecture this Thursday. (Our final class meeting next week is a review session for the final exam.) I’ve published several posts building off of my lectures for the class, including those on Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, Antonio Gramsci, Irving Kristol, neoliberalism and its left-wing critics, and Samuel Francis.

For my final post keyed to the class, I thought readers might appreciate seeing how I responded to my students’ request for a lecture summing up the course as a whole. I don’t blame them for requesting this. I threw an enormous amount at them this semester: a new theorist almost every single class (twice a week) for 14 weeks. Other than breaking the class down into seven thematic units, I didn’t do a lot to bring it all together into a coherent narrative. So what I did for them in my final lecture, and what I’ll do for my subscribers in this post, is present three distinct but overlapping stories to make overarching sense of the seven units and the several thinkers I clustered into each.

(I promise to have at least one post next week that’s more closely tied to the news than the two I’ve published this week. I’ll admit it’s been nice to ignore the campus protests and the Trump legal drama(s) and much else. But duty will be calling me back to the news cycle very soon.)

The Seven Units