Power & Revolution

Seven steps into the question beneath all the others: what is politics, what is power — and what is it for?

A course on the thought of Political Philosophy.

Course outline

1. What Politics Is — The frame for the whole course: the three activities of the active life — labor, work, action — and why ACTION, the speech and deed among plural equals, is the properly political one; plurality and…
2. The Realm of Its Own, and the Founder — Machiavelli's discovery that the political is a realm with its own logic and its own excellence — virtù, irreducible to private or Christian morality — and the founder who, to bring a lasting free…
3. Power and Violence — Arendt severs two words the whole tradition fused: power is the human ability to act in concert, springing up between people and lasting only while they hold together — an end in itself; violence is…
4. Revolution and the Social Question — Marx's answer and the course's live antagonism: revolution as the engine of history, the proletariat as the universal class, the violent expropriation of the expropriators — and the insistence…
5. The Conservative Answer — Burke against revolution itself: society as a partnership across the generations of the living, the dead, and the unborn; the inherited wisdom of prejudice and prescription against the abstract…
6. Totalitarianism and the Banality of Evil — Arendt on the century's novel horror: totalitarianism not as a harsher tyranny but as a new form of rule that atomizes individuals, makes them superfluous, and aims to destroy spontaneity itself…
7. Power Everywhere, and What Politics Is For — Foucault's challenge — that power is not held at the apex but exercised from everywhere, productive and capillary, the administration of life itself — and then Arendt's closing verdict: the lost…

Part of the Symposium course library.