HIST 608
Winter 2001
POWER: THEORY AND HISTORY

Tuesday, 2:00 - 4:20
History Faculty Lounge
Professor Ellen Herman
office: 321 Grayson
phone number: 346-3118
e-mail: eherman@darkwing.uoregon.edu
office hours: Tuesday: 9:00 - 10:00; Thursday: 2:30 - 3:30

This seminar is designed to familiarize graduate students with a variety of approaches to power and its conceptual correlates: domination, authority, hegemony, deference, discipline, agency, resistance, and empowerment, among others. We will divide our attention between theories of power (drawn from political theory, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and social criticism indebted to marxism and feminism) and scholarship on the modern United States that illustrates the potential usefulness to historical and empirical inquiry of one or more of these theoretical approaches. The aim of the seminar is not to develop a single, systematic, or unified concept of power but rather to explore the possibilities available and treat them as resources for research and teaching.

Readings and discussions are the heart of this seminar. Everything depends on class participation. To facilitate that worthy goal, students will rotate responsibility for leading seminar discussions, alone or with a colleague.

The writing requirement, upon which much of your grade will depend, will be a paper--approximately 20-25 pages in length--that tackles a single case study of power. The goal is to think and write about the advantages and disadvantages of using one or more theoretical vocabularies in historical analysis. Each student will choose his or her topic in consultation with the instructor as early in the quarter as possible. The paper may be based on either secondary materials or original research that is already underway.

Texts:

Books are available for purchase at the UO Bookstore, along with a course packet that includes a number of article-length readings. I will do my best to insure that everything is also placed on reserve in the library. Please notice that you have choices about what to read during the second half of the course, so even if you want to buy all the books you will be reading, it will not be necessary to buy everything on the list.

THEORY

week 1 (January 9): The Power of Class and Status: Domination, Interest, Violence

Check out the web site for Fragments #2, "Power": http://www.mindspring.com/~fragments/TXT2/frg2home.html

Thomas Hobbes, "Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honour, and Worthinesse," in Leviathan (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 62-69.

Karl Marx, "Marx on the History of His Opinions" and "The German Ideology: Part 1," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2^nd edition, Robert Tucker, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton), 3-6, 146-200.

Max Weber, "Domination by Economic Power and by Authority," in Power, Steven Lukes, ed., 28-36.

Max Weber, "Class, Status, Party," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H.H. Gert and C. Wright Mills, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 180-195.

Nicos Poulantzas, "Class Power," in Power, Steven Lukes, ed.,144-155.

Hannah Arendt, "Communicative Power," in Power, Steven Lukes, ed., 59-74.

Jurgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power," in Power, Steven Lukes, ed., 75-93.

John Kenneth Galbraith, "Power and Organization," in Power, Steven Lukes, ed., 211-228.

C. Wright Mills, "The Structure of Power in American Society," in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, Irving Louis Horowitz, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 23-38.

week 2 (January 16): Power/Knowledge

Michel Foucault, "Disciplinary Power and Subjection," in Power, Steven Lukes, ed., 229-242.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

week 3 (January 23): The Power of Patriarchy: Gender and Sexuality

Andrea Dworkin, "Dirt/Death," in Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987), 169-194.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Power and Powerlessness in Women," in Power Trips and Other Journeys: Essays in Feminism as Civic Discourse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 134-148.

Sigmund Freud, "Resistance and Repression" and "The Sexual Life of Human Beings," in Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis (London: The Hogarth Press, 1963), 286-319.

Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union," in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, Lydia Sargent, ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 1-41.

Audre Lorde, "The Erotic as Power" (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press Pamphlet, 1978).

Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination" and "Desire and Power," in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) , 32-45, 46-62.

Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, Rayna Reiter, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.

Joan Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (December 1986):1053-1075.

week 4: (January 30): The Power of Culture: Social Construction and Hegemony

Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90 (June 1985):567-593.

week 5 (February 6): Resisting Power

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

HISTORY

week 6 (February 13): Reimagining Class: Making Room for Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000).

or

Robin D. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994).

week 7 (February 20): Psychiatry and Surveillance

Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

or

Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

week 8 (February 27): Capitalism, Closets, Contraception

John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3-16.

and

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

or

Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).

week 9 (March 6): Is Science Socially Constructed?

Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

or

Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

week 10 (March 13): The Powers of the Weak: The Decline of "Grand Narrative" and the Revival of Narrative as a Form of Historical Writing

Dorothy Ross, "Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty," American Historical Review 100 (June 1995):651-677.

James Goodman, "For the Love of Stories," Reviews in American History 26 (March 1998):255-274.

James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Vintage, 1994)

SOCIAL THEORY RESOURCES ON THE INTERNET

Anarchy Archives Internet. Available: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/archivehome.html.

Dead Sociologists' Society. Internet. Available: http://www.runet.edu/~lridener/DSS/DEADSOC.HTML.

Foucault Pages. Internet. Available: http://www.csun.edu/~hfspc002/foucault.home.html.

Foucault: The Legacy. Internet. Available: http://www.qut.edu.au/edu/cpol/foucault/.

Freudian Links. Internet. Available: http://www.mii.kurume-u.ac.jp/~leuers/Freud.htm.

Jurgen Habermas. Internet. Available: http://www.phy.nau.edu/~danmac/habcritthy.html.

Marx/Engels Internet Archive. Internet. Available: http://www.marx.org/.

Postmodern Thought. Internet. Available: http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/postmodern.html.

Sigmund Freud and the Freud Archives. Internet. Available: http://plaza.interport.net/nypsan/freudarc.html.

Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. Internet. Available: http://freud.t0.or.at/freud/index-e.htm.

SocioSite: Sociologists and Sociological Subjects. Internet. Available: http://www.pscw.uva.nl/sociosite/TOPICS/Sociologists.html.

theory.org.uk /mass media, identity, gender, sexuality. Internet. Available: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ics/theory/index.htm.

Tocqueville's America. Internet. Available: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/intro.htm.

Voice of the Shuttle: Cultural Studies Page. Internet. Available: http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/shuttle/cultural.html.