POLI 3627 Politics and Character: The American Case

This course is restricted to Political Science sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Alexis de Tocqueville devotes the second volume of Democracy in America to an account of how the American democracy shapes the souls of its citizens, and how those souls in turn shape its politics. This course will explore the American soul with the help of Tocqueville and a variety of astute American observers -- Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Henry Adams, for example, in the realm of autobiography, and such writers as Twain, Melville, Wharton, Bellow, Ellison, O'Connor, and Penn Warren, in the realm of fiction. There may be extra credit opportunities involving great American movies.