U.S. Political Thought -- PS308


Short Essay Questions for Cold War Democracy and the New Social Movements


November 26, 1995
Due: December 7th, 1995 by 5:00pm

Note: You may either turn in the essay when you take the final exam, or you may put it in my mail slot on the ninth floor of PLC (across from the elevators). The exam is on Tuesday, so you have two additional days to complete your essay.


1. Do undemocratic authority relationships in major social institutions (corporations, schools, the family, the military, and so forth) support or subvert political democracy? Explain the opposing viewpoints of Hayden and Huntington. Are we currently in danger from too much democracy or too little?

2. Write an essay on the traces in Hayden of one or more of the previous writers included in this course. The Anti-Federalists, Thoreau, Douglass, Addams, the Populists, and Dewey all come to mind based primarily on political affinities. Similarly, Hamilton and Sumner reflect elitist values whose post-WWII form Hayden opposes. The choice of writer(s) to consider is yours.

3. How did Hayden portray student activism and apathy? Does his description apply today? What changes do you see the in circumstances and attitudes of students?

4. How does Huntington compare with James Madison, whom he quotes on the need to “control the governed” (63)?

5. Croly, an early proponent of the liberal social welfare state, portrays it as a democratic one. Hayden, the radical critic of an extensively developed liberal welfare state, views it as a device for stabilizing elite rule and preventing democracy, and regards its ameliorative reforms as little more than devices for preserving social peace without altering the “tyrannical conditions” under which people live.

Reexamine Croly in light of Hayden. Was Croly proposing the kind of system which Hayden condemned sixty years later as “American barbarism,” or are Croly and Hayden at opposite ends of a continuum of democratic reform efforts (Croly the early optimist, Hayden the pessimist radicalized by his assessment of the perverse results of earlier reform efforts)? Consider in particular their views of democratic process, the extent of democratic rule over the economy, the role of the state, and their positions on racism.

6. How does Martin Luther King justify civil disobedience? What is its purpose, why is it necessary, what makes it moral and just? What makes nonviolent civil disobedience effective? When might it not be?

7. Compare King with Thoreau on civil disobedience. There are many similarities; are there also differences?

8. Who/what is a cyborg? Why does Haraway think that the myth of the cyborg could be important to those “trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination” (196)?

9. Carson warns of a world in which persistent pollutants (chemicals and radiation) produced in huge quantities sicken and kill plants, animals and people. Unless we begin working with nature instead of disrupting it, ecological catastrophe may result. Simon and Kahn respond to this kind of environmentalist warning by arguing that free market techno-economic development will continue to improve human life, provided that environmentalists’ irrational fear of science and its products does not interfere politically. Did you find Simon and Kahn reassuring? Why/why not? Looking back on these works (Silent Spring was published in 1962, The Resourceful Earth in 1984), which do you think has held up better in light of what we know now about ecological problems?

10. Your question (please speak with me about it before proceeding).