Masterworks of International Relations - SIS 604

Description

International Relations as a discipline is fairly young; the first professional department of IR was established in 1919, making the modern study of world politics less than a century old. This course divides its attention between a) the classical philosophical antecedents of contemporary IR debates and b) works of disciplinary IR that we rarely read any longer on the grounds that they have been superceded. (I relax these principles somewhat in the final two weeks of the course, selecting two books dealing with a theme—international ethics—that has been traditionally marginalized in the discipline.) The goal here is to provide a fuller context for contemporary controversies, and perhaps to shed light on the horizons of the world that we presently inhabit—and to open the possibility of re-shaping those horizons.