Poli 547A/001 – Interpretation and Criticism in Political Inquiry
Prof.: Bruce Baum
Office: Buchanan C412
email: bbaum@politics.ubc.ca
Telephone: 822-2490
Time: Friday, 2-5 pm
Office Hrs: Tues., 1:30-3 pm
Th, 1:30-2:30 pm;
& by apt.
(esp. Tues, between 3-5)
Course description:
Karl Marx famously said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point is to change it.” In so doing he pinpointed a central point of contestation
for students of politics and political actors: the tension between seeking to understand the
political world and aiming to change it, particularly with respect to its oppressive aspects.
Marx also set the tone for one approach to political criticism when he said that religion
“is the sigh of the oppressed ... the opium of the people.” This remains a provocative
challenge to how prevailing beliefs are shaped by prevailing relations of power; but it
also remains at odds with how many people understand and enact their religious
convictions. Accordingly, some commentators have suggested that Marx wrongly
counterpoised interpreting the world and working to change it. They contend that the aim
of changing the world is integrally connected to that of adequately interpreting or
understanding it. From this perspective Marx’s criticism of religion fails to address
sufficiently religion’s meaning and significance. Interpretive social scientists emphasize
that political activity is thoroughly embedded in and shaped by people’s everyday
languages and conceptions. From a hermeneutical interpretive perspective, efforts to
explain political phenomena must be joined with efforts to comprehend what political
agents understand themselves to be doing. That is, political inquiry must take account of
the self-understandings of political agents. This does not mean, however, that political
analysis comes to an end with agents’ self-understandings. Arguably, Marx was right that
prevailing relations of power, including forms of domination, shape people’s beliefs and
self-conceptions.
This course will survey major interpretive and critical approaches to political inquiry
including hermeneutics & interpretive social science, Critical Theory, Foucauldian
genealogy, deconstruction, critical realism, and feminism. Substantive topics will include
gender, racism, and religion.
I. Texts:
Course Reading Packet. This will be available through the UBC Bookstore.
Bob Carter, Realism and Racism: Concepts of Race in Sociological Research (Routledge,
2000). This will also be available through library reserve.
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, Or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick
Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Brent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it
Can Succeed Again (Cambridge, 2001).
II. Course Format:
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There will be one seminar per week. All students are required to read the assigned
readings (see below); you are encouraged (but not expected) to read the “supplemental”
readings. (For the seminars, don’t worry about the texts listed “For further study.”) The
seminars will be organized (roughly) as follows:
A. Overview by instructor (10-15 min.). B. Student presentations (next 10-20 min.).
C. Class discussion (approx. 45 min.). D. Break, at approx. 3:30-3:45 pm.
E. Further class discussion and wrap-up (3:45-5 pm).
III. Assignments and evaluation:
A. Attendance and class participation: come prepared to share in weekly
discussions. Participation will constitute 20% of your overall course grade. One
or two of you will be assigned to give oral presentations each week, at the start of
the seminar; this will count as part of your overall participation mark. Those of
you who find it difficult to speak in groups are encouraged to submit two brief
(1/2 page-1 pg, single-spaced) analytical, critical reflection papers about one
key idea or concept in the assigned readings for the week. These short papers
must be submitted at the weekly seminar, on Friday, and both are due by April 9.
(Thus, these short papers must address readings and topics that we discuss in class
between Jan. 8-April 9.) If you are a steady (as well as respectful and never
overbearing) participant in seminar discussions, you may skip these critical
reflection papers.
B. Two short analytical essays: in about 3-3 1/2 pages, double spaced (roughly
1000-1200 words, no more), you will critically assess one of the key ideas or
concepts (or a couple of closely related ideas or concepts) in one of the
approaches to interpretation and criticism. The first short essay, due on Jan. 29,
must focus on one of the theoretical approaches that we examine in class from
Jan. 15-Jan. 29. (If you would like, you may make reference to the film we watch
on Jan. 8 for this paper.) The second, due on Mar. 19, must focus on one of the
theoretical approaches that we examine in class from Jan. 29-March 19. You may
draw on another (or other) theoretical perspective(s) to help you to develop your
own critical analysis. Keep in mind that a critical assessment may consist of a
defense of a given theoretical perspective. These papers will count for 10% and
20%, respectively, of your overall course grade.
C. Term paper: 10-15 pages, double-spaced. The topic is open though limited to the
broad terrain of the seminar. In addition to the topics that we address during the
term (various interpretive and critical approaches; religion; “race” and racism)
you might want to address such topics as the following: contemporary critiques of
political economy (e.g., neo-Marxist, feminist, ecological); democracy; and
nationalism. This paper is (tentatively) due on Monday, April 26, at 4:30 pm.
This paper will count for 50% of your overall course grade.
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Please review UBC’s plagiarism policies (see the Poli Sci Dept’s and the Faculty of Arts
websites). Plagiarism is a serious offense and our department enforces these policies
fully.
You should retain copies of all submitted assignments including marked assignments. In
keeping with departmental policy you will be required to submit your final essays to
TurnItIn.com, a service that the university uses to help identify cases of plagiarism. For
more information, see www.Turnitin.com.
IV. Topics and dates:
Week I. Introduction: Criticism and Interpretation, Interpretation as Criticism –
Jan. 8
Classic modern critics and a film:
Karl Marx and Harriet Taylor, excerpts briefly discussed.
Film: “Where the Green Ants Dream” (1983), by Werner Herzog.
Background reading to accompany the film:
Andrew W. Hurley, “Whose Dreaming? Intercultural appropriation, representations of
Aboriginality, and the process of film-making in Werner Herzog’s Where the Green
Ants Dream (1983),” Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol. 1, nos. 2 (2007), 175-190.
You can access this article through UBC Library.
Week II. Hans-Georg Gadamer and hermeneutics – Jan. 15
Reading assignment:
Gadamer, Truth and Method, excerpts in CRP.
Introduction and Forward to the Second Edition (pp. xx-xxxvi), pp. 268-306 (from ch. 4,
“Elements of a Theory of Hermeneutic Experience,” with notes on pp. 372-77), pp. 43652, 469-84 (from ch. 5, “Language and Hermeneutics,” with notes on pp.488-93).
Supplemental (both in CRP):
Veronica Vasterling, “Postmodern Hermeneutics? Toward a Critical Hermeneutics.”
Paul Ricoeur, “Explanation and Understanding.”
Week III. Hermeneutics in Interpretive Social Science – Jan. 22
Reading assignment (all in CRP):
Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man”
Taylor, “Ethnocentricity and Understanding”
Clifford Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological
Understanding”
Andrew Davison, “The Interpretive Commitment in Political Science”
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If you have time also read “Interview with Clifford Geertz” in the set of readings for
Week XII (see below).
For further study:
Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures.
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology
(Basic Books, 1983).
Anindita Niyogi Balslev, ed., Cross-Cultural Conversation (Initiation) (Scholars Press,
1996).
Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, eds., Understanding and Social Inquiry
(University of Notre Dame Press, 1977)
Andrew Davison, Secularism and Revivalism in Turkey: A Hermeneutic Reconsideration
(Yale University Press, 1998).
Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: a Reader
(University of California Press, 1979).
William Rehg and James Bohman, eds., Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: the
Transformation of Critical Theory, Essays in Honor of Thomas McCarthy (MIT
Press, 2001).
Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Harvard University Press, 1987).
Peter Winch, “Understanding Primitive Society,” in Dallmayr and McCarthy, eds.,
Understanding and Social Inquiry.
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (c. 1950-51), ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H.
von Wright (Blackwell, 1974).
Week IV. Critical Theory – Jan. 29
Reading assignment (both in CRP):
Jürgen Habermas, “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective.”
Jürgen Habermas, “Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” excerpt, pp. 351-61 (esp.
359-61).
Thomas McCarthy, “Philosophy and Critical Theory: A Reprise” (from Hoy and
McCarthy, Critical Theory, 1994). Pay special attention to secs. 1 & 2.
Herbert Marcuse, “The Research of Total Administration” (excerpt from Marcuse, OneDimensional Man, 1964).
Here Marcuse discusses some political science research of the time on the topic of
“democracy.”
Recommended.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Moralism as egoistic universalism” (from his Pascalian Meditations)
* This is a good complement to the excerpt from Marcuse – another critical
theory approach to democracy.
For further study:
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Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: a Study of the Foundations of Critical
Theory (Columbia University Press, 1986).
Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (U of Pennsylvania
Press, 1978).
______________, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and
Praxis (U of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory (Blackwell, 1994).
John S. Dryzek, "Critical Theory as a research program," in The Cambridge Companion
to Habermas (Cambridge, 1995).
Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences (MIT Press, 1988).
______________, Truth and Justification (MIT Press, 2003).
Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), in Horkheimer, Critical
Theory (Seabury Press, 1972).
David Couzens Hoy, “Critical Theory and Critical History,” in Hoy and McCarthy,
Critical Theory, 1994
Hoy, “Rejoinder to Thomas McCarthy,” Hoy and McCarthy, Critical Theory.
Hoy, “Debating Critical Theory,” Constellations 3 (April 1996): 104-114.
David Ingram, “Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Robert C. Solomon and
David Sherman, eds. The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy (Blackwell,
2003).
Hans Herbert Kögler, The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and
Foucault, trans. Paul Hendrickson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
McCarthy, “Rejoinder to David Hoy,” in Hoy and McCarthy, Critical Theory.
McCarthy, “Philosophy and Critical Theory: A Reply to Richard Rorty and Seyla
Benhabib,” Constellations 3 (April 1996): 95-103.
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: a Reinterpretation of Marx's
Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Stephen K. White, “Toward a Critical Political Science,” in Idioms of Inquiry: Critique
and Renewal in Political Science, ed. Terence Ball (SUNY Press, 1987).
_______________, “The very idea of a critical social science: a pragmatist turn,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge, 2004).
Week V. Michel Foucault’s Genealogical Criticism – Feb. 5
Reading assignment (all in CRP):
Foucault, from History of Sexuality, vol. I: Intro to Part Four and Pt. IV, ch. 1,
“Objective” and ch. 2, “Method.”
Foucault, “Truth and Power” (from Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon)
Foucault, “Politics and Reason” (1979)
Note: This Foucault essay is relevant to our later examination of religion.
Joseph Rouse, “Power/ Knowledge” (2005)
Supplemental:
Foucault, “Questions of Method: an Interview” (c. 1980), in CRP.
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For further study:
Michel Foucault, “Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, with The
Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
Gary Gutting, “Introduction – Michel Foucault: A User’s Manual,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Foucault, second edition, ed. Gutting (Cambridge, 2005).
Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005).
Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (Routledge, 1999).
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and
the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
* For a useful review of the latter text, see:
Pankaj Mishra, “Misunderstood Muslims,” The New York Review of Books vol. 52
(November 17, 2005), pp. 15-18.
Week VI. Jacques Derrida’s “Deconstruction” – Feb. 12
Reading assignment (all in CRP):
Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
(1966), from Derrida, Writing and Difference (1978)
Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, Or the Prosthesis of Origin (1999).
Derrida, “The Last of the Rogue States: The ‘Democracy to Come,’ Opening in Two
Turns,” from Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005)
Supplemental:
Gayatri Spivak, “Appendix: Setting the Work of Deconstruction” (from Spivak, A
Critique of Postcolonial Reason), in CRP. Useful background for Derrida.
Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Derrida, "Différance" (1968), from Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (1982)
Derrida, "The Ends of Man" (1968), from Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (1982)
Derrida, “Signature Even Context,” in Derrida, Limited Inc (Northwestern University
Press, 1988)
Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction: the
Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1989).
Lasse Thomassen, ed. The Derrida-Habermas Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006).
Among Derrida’s main works in political theory are the following:
"Force of Law: 'The Mystical Foundation of Authority,"' in Deconstruction and the
Possibility of Justice, eds., Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray
Carlson, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 3-67.
Philosophy in the Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques
Derrida, ed., Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Politics of Friendship, trans., George Collins (London: Verso, 1997).
Specters of Marx, trans., Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
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** Midterm Break, Feb. 15-26 **
Week VII. Critical Realism, I – March 5
Reading assignment:
Margaret Archer, “Introduction: Realism in the Social Sciences,” in CRP.
Bob Carter, Realism and Racism: Concepts of Race in Sociological Research, chs. 1-4.
Critical realism has been developed by theorists such as Roy Bhaskar, Archer, and
Carter. Critical realists (sometimes called scientific realists) have addressed concerns
about the interplay between power and knowledge – raised by Critical Theorists,
feminists, and Foucault – while working to defend certain aspects of the scientific
method, rehabilitating notions truth and validity in social scientific practice, from a postpositivist perspective. Critical realism, then, seeks contextualized but non-relativist
commitments to truth and rationality.
Supplemental:
Margaret Archer [et al.], eds., Critical Realism: Essential Readings (Routledge, 1998).
* Bruce Baum, “Introduction,” in The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race, NYU Press
2006. This is available for downloading from my departmental webpage. I adopt
and adapt of Archer’s version of critical realism.
Bob Carter and Caroline New, eds., Making Realism Work: Realist Social Theory
and Empirical Research (London: Routledge, 2004).
Week VIII. Critical Realism, II – March 12
Read:
Carter, Realism and Racism, chs. 5-9.
Week IX: Feminism and Cross-Cultural Interpretation – March 19
Reading assignment (in CRP):
Joan Wallach Scott, “Preface to the Revised Edition” (1999) and “Gender: A Useful
Category of Historical Analysis”
Georgia Warnke, “Social Identity as Interpretation”
Gayatri Spivak, “History” (from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 1999)
Note: There is a lot of reading for this week as Spivak’s chapter is quite long. If you are
short of time you might read the shorter works by Scott and Warnke with greater care
and Spivak’s chapter more quickly. Think about how these three authors make use of
hermeneutical (particularly Warnke) and genealogical (as well as deconstructive, Scott
and Spivak) approaches to gender.
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Supplemental reading:
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes” (in CRP) – recommended.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “’Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity
through Anticapitalist Struggle,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
v. 28 (2003), pp. 499–535.
Marnia Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women
in Algeria,” in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in
Feminism (Routledge, 1990).
Spivak, “The New Subaltern: A Silent Interview,” in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the
Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (Vero, 2000),
One of my efforts to address this terrain:
Bruce Baum, "Feminist Politics of Recognition," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society 29, nos. 4 (Summer 2004).
Week X. Engaging Religion, 1: Hermeneutical and Critical Theories – March 26
Reading assignment (in CRP):
Max Horkheimer, “Thoughts on Religion”
Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism”
Taylor, A Secular Age (2007), excerpts, pp. 1-22, 504-35, 711-27, 773-76.
** April 2: No class as I will be going to a conference. Assuming that this works for
everyone, we will have a make-up class on April 16, the day after the official last day of
classes.
Week XI. Engaging Religion, 2: Hermeneutical and Genealogical Approaches –
April 9.
Reading assignment:
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003), excerpts,
“Introduction: Thinking About Secularism” and ch. 6, “Secularism, Nation-State,
Religion,” in CRP.
Gianni Vattimo, “The Trace of the Trace,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni
Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998)
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Dialogues in Capri,” in Religion.
Note: I will make the last two essays available later.
Supplemental reading: recommended if you have time.
William Connolly, “Europe: A Minor Tradition,” in CRP.
Talal Asad, “Secularism, hegemony, and fullness” (Nov 17, 2007, Posted in Secularism,
A Secular Age), on SSRC Blogs: The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion,
and the Public Sphere. At:
http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2007/11/17/secularism-hegemony-andfullness/
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Lawrence Rosen, “Homesick Everywhere” (review of Oliver Roy, Globalized Islam;
Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds) (2005, in CRP)
Ronald Aronson, “Faith No More? Against the rising tide of rejuvenated religion, a
number of writers make the case for disbelief,” Bookforum 12 (Oct.-Nov. 05, in
CRP)
For further study:
Clifford Geertz, “Religion as Cultural System,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.
Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Analytical Category” (from Asad,
Genealogies of Religion, 1993), pp. 27-54 (critique of Geertz, in part).
Mathhias Lutz-Bachman, “Critical Theory and Religion” (2001)
Maeve Cooke, “Critical Theory and Religion” (2001)
* These essays are both from D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, eds., Philosophy
of Religion in the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2001).
Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left
(London: Verso, 2003).
Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). This
volume includes Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’
at the Limits of Reason Alone,” along with related essays by Vattimo and
Gadamer.
Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida,
ed. Bettina Bego, Joseph Cohen, and R. Zaury-Orly (Fordham U. Press, 2007).
Paul Ricoeur, “The Critique of Religion,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An
Anthology of His Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978).
Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New
York: Routledge, 2005).
Week XI: Retrospective: Interpretivism, Practical Reason, and Practicing Political
Inquiry – April 16
Reading assignment:
Brent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it
Can Succeed Again (Cambridge, 2001), chapters 1, 3, and 5-11.
If you have time, also read or skim chapters 2 & 4.
Supplemental reading: recommended if you have time.
Michael T. Gibbons, “Hermeneutics, Political Inquiry, and Practical Reason: An
Evolving Challenge to the Science of Politics” (2006), in CRP.
** Keith Topper, “In Defense of Disunity: Pragmatism, Hermeneutics, and the Social
Sciences,” Political Theory 28 (August 2000), 509-39, available on line throught
the UBC Library. Topper will be here to give a talk this term.
For further study:
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Hauke Brunkhorst, “Critical Theory and Empirical Research” (1996, in CRP)
Brain Caterino and Sanford Schram, eds., Making Political Science Matter: Debating
Knowledge, Research, and Method (NYU Press, 2006
** Final papers are due on Monday, April 26, at 4:30 pm. **
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