Great Themes in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Political and Legal Theory – Great Themes in the Rhetoric of Legal and Political Theory

Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times presents a collection of profiles of persons, including Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, whom Arendt claimed illuminated – rather than represented – the darkness of the first half the twentieth century. She refers to the “political catastrophes, … moral disasters, and … astonishing development of the arts and sciences” during the period. We will spend much of the semester working through Arendt’s essays and related readings. We will then spend some time pondering the character of our early twenty-first century times, touching on such issues as health crises, environmental change, political upheavals, and advances in technology. We will ask whether and how, as Arendt writes, “even in the darkest of times,” illumination may come “from the uncertain, flickering and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, … kindle … and shed over the time span that was given them on earth.”

Reading, writing, and class participation required.