Instructor: M. Dosemeci
This course will examine the global history of radical democracy from the French Revolution to the present. Our task is to trace the various attempts to practice democracy that lie outside of the liberal representative model. Spanning the political spectrum, we will investigate everything from democratic armies and factories, anarchist pirate utopias, to claims by many Germans that Nazi Germany “felt more democratic” than its predecessor the Weimar Republic. What sense are we to make of these exceptions to liberal representative democracy? We will ask what these radical ways of organizing and instituting society offer us and question why and how the liberal model has come to hegemonize our conception of democracy today
