Course Introduction
It arrives as convenience.
In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville described a new kind of despotism that didn't look like tyranny at all. No jackboots, no dungeons. Just a vast, tutelary power that provided for citizens' needs, smoothed their pleasures, managed their major affairs — and slowly relieved them of the trouble of thinking for themselves. He was describing something he saw coming. We start here not because Tocqueville is the oldest theorist on the syllabus. We start here because he is the most immediately legible. Name one platform, one subsidy, one discount that has made your life easier and narrower at the same time. That's Week 1. Then we walk backward to 1651 to find out where the logic started.
The Boop · Course Thesis
Every theorist in this course was responding to a crisis that looked unprecedented. None of it was. The patterns run. Once you see them, you can't unsee them.
POLS-101 · Introduction to Political Theory
About This Course
What This Course Is
Political theory is the attempt to answer questions that politics keeps raising and never settling: What makes authority legitimate? When is obedience owed and when is resistance required? Who decides what justice is? This course runs those questions from Hobbes through Foucault — not as a history of ideas, but as a live argument that hasn't been resolved and is playing out right now.
We begin with Tocqueville because he's the most useful entry point into the present. We move backward to the contract theorists to understand the foundations he was critiquing. We arrive at Marx and Gramsci to understand how power naturalizes itself through ideology and consent. We end with Arendt and Foucault because they describe mechanisms — not historical episodes — and the mechanisms are portable.
The goal isn't to pick a theorist. The goal is to develop a toolkit: a set of lenses that let you read any political situation, including the one you're living through. By Session 15 you will re-read the Tocqueville passage from Session 1. What you see the second time is the course.
On Theory and the Present
Political theory has a reputation for being abstract. It isn't. It is the most practical thing on the curriculum — because it names the patterns that practitioners and commentators are usually too close to see. The theorists in this course were writing in the middle of crises. Read them that way. The distance is pedagogical, not real.
How This Connects Across the Curriculum
POLS-101 is the theoretical foundation for several other courses. SB-1970 takes Foucault's analysis of power into lived experience and the body. SB-1971 applies the political lens to narrative structure — who gets to tell the story and why. AMST-210 is the American case study this course keeps glancing at. COGN-120 explains why the patterns are so hard to see from inside them.
Four Threads — running across all sessions
Legitimacy — how power makes itself seem right
Resistance — counter-movements, refusal, alternatives
Structure — how systems persist across individuals
Time — long patterns, cycles, the long game
Syllabus
1
Tocqueville's Soft Despotism — "It arrives as convenience."
Time
Legitimacy
Anchor: Tocqueville, Democracy in America — Vol. II, Pt. 4, Ch. 6–7
We begin in the present. Find one convenience in your current life — a platform, a service, a benefit — that has made something easier and narrower at the same time. Write it down. Then read Tocqueville's description of the "immense and tutelary power" that covers society with a network of small, complicated, uniform rules, and keeps citizens in perpetual childhood. He wrote this in 1835. The prompt for the whole course is: what has changed?
Soft despotism doesn't look like oppression. It looks like getting what you wanted. That's what makes it soft.
2
Hobbes and the State of Nature — Why We Surrender Power in the First Place
Legitimacy
Structure
Anchor: Hobbes, Leviathan — Pt. I Ch. 13–15; Pt. II Ch. 17–21
Without authority, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes's social contract as a surrender of rights in exchange for security. The sovereign's absolute power as the price of peace. Hobbes wrote during a civil war. Context is everything. The question worth sitting with: what does it tell us that the foundational argument for political authority is an argument from fear?
Hobbes's social contract is not optimistic. It is clear-eyed. That's different from cynical.
3
Locke and Consent — The Contract and Its Fictions
Legitimacy
Resistance
Anchor: Locke, Second Treatise — Ch. 2, 5, 8–9, 19 (public domain)
Locke's correction of Hobbes: government doesn't require absolute sovereignty. It exists to protect natural rights — life, liberty, and estate — and forfeits its legitimacy when it fails to do so. The right of revolution follows logically. Locke is the intellectual foundation of 1776. The critical question he never quite answers: what counts as consent when you were born into a system you never agreed to?
Locke gave us "consent of the governed." He did not tell us what counts as consent. That argument is still open.
4
Rousseau and the General Will — When the People Become the Problem
Legitimacy
Time
Anchor: Rousseau, The Social Contract — Books I–II; Discourse on Inequality (selections)
Rousseau's indictment of civilization: property corrupted us, and the social contract as usually practiced is a con by the wealthy. The general will vs. the will of all — a distinction that has generated 250 years of argument about what it means for a democratic majority to get things wrong. Rousseau and Locke are both canonical. They are almost completely incompatible. This is not a bug in political theory.
The general will isn't what most people want. It's what they would want if they were thinking clearly about the common good. That distinction is either the foundation of democracy or the seed of authoritarianism. Often both.
5
Marx and Base/Superstructure — How Economics Organizes Everything Else
Structure
Legitimacy
Anchor: Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (selections); Communist Manifesto — Part I (public domain)
Reading: Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
The base/superstructure model: economic relations are the foundation; law, politics, culture, and religion are the superstructure built on top. The ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of its ruling class. This is the session that makes Sessions 6 and 7 legible — you can't understand ideology or hegemony without understanding what Marx thought they were doing. Note: we are not adjudicating whether Marx was right. We are learning a framework for reading how material interests shape political ideas.
Marx didn't say economics is the only thing that matters. He said it is the thing everyone pretends doesn't matter. That's a different claim.
Unit I Checkpoint
Choose one social arrangement you participate in that feels natural or inevitable. Apply one framework from this unit to make the arrangement visible as a choice — made by someone, serving someone. What does the framework reveal? What does it leave out?
6
Ideology — The Ideas That Make the Arrangement Feel Inevitable
Legitimacy
Structure
Anchor: Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (selections)
Reading: Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction — Ch. 1
Ideology isn't propaganda — it's the air you breathe. Althusser's distinction between Repressive State Apparatuses (army, police, prisons) and Ideological State Apparatuses (schools, churches, media, family). The second category reproduces the conditions of production without anyone noticing. We don't experience ideology as ideology — we experience it as common sense. The practice: find one thing you believe is "just how things work" and ask who benefits from you believing that.
Ideology is most powerful when it's invisible. The moment you can name it, it loses some of its grip. That's what this unit is for.
7
Gramsci and Hegemony — Consent Without Coercion
Legitimacy
Structure
Resistance
Anchor: Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (selections on hegemony and civil society)
Gramsci extends Marx: the ruling class doesn't just control the economy — it controls the terms of common sense. Hegemony is the process by which one group's worldview becomes the worldview, so that even dominated groups consent to arrangements that don't serve them. The key Gramscian question isn't "why do people obey?" It's "why do people participate?" Gramsci also gives us the counter-concept: the organic intellectual, the war of position, the possibility of counter-hegemony. Power that works through consent can be challenged through consent.
If the army keeps you in line, you know you're being kept in line. If you're keeping yourself in line, you don't. Hegemony is the second kind.
8
Arendt on Totalitarianism — When the Exception Becomes the Rule
Structure
Time
Anchor: Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism — Pt. III Ch. 11, Ch. 13
Reading: Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem — Epilogue
Arendt's analysis of how totalitarian movements emerge: atomization, loneliness, the destruction of the public realm, the replacement of reality with ideology. The banality of evil is not a warning from history — it is a description of a mechanism. The mechanism is portable. Arendt's crucial distinction: power requires consent and collective action; violence is what replaces power when it has been lost. A government that rules by violence alone has already lost power. File that for later.
Totalitarianism doesn't begin with the camps. It begins with the erasure of the distinction between public and private life, and the replacement of political judgment with ideology.
9
Foucault and Governmentality — Power That Doesn't Need a Ruler
Structure
Legitimacy
Anchor: Foucault, Discipline and Punish — Pt. III Ch. 3 ("Panopticism")
Power isn't just what the state does to you. It operates through every institution — schools, hospitals, norms, expertise. The panopticon as a model: you don't need a guard in the tower if the prisoner believes there might be one. Modern power works by producing subjects who regulate themselves. This session introduces the concept; the full treatment of Foucault lives in SB-1970, which takes his analysis of power into lived experience, the body, and institutional life. Consider this the entry point.
The through-line from Gramsci to Foucault: hegemony operates through consent; Foucauldian discipline operates through internalized surveillance. Both locate power inside the subject, not just above them. SB-1970 goes further.
10
The State's Claim on Violence — Weber and the Monopoly
Legitimacy
Structure
Anchor: Weber, "Politics as a Vocation" (free, widely available)
Reading: Weber, Economy and Society — selections on legitimate domination
Weber's three types of legitimate authority: traditional, charismatic, rational-legal. The state as the entity that successfully claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Weber is precise about "legitimate" — it's not that states are the only ones who use violence, but that they are the only ones whose use of it is considered legitimate. What happens when that legitimacy erodes? The iron cage of bureaucracy as modernity's achievement and its trap.
Weber's definition of the state is the most useful sentence in political science. It contains everything you need to know about why political authority is always contested.
Unit II Checkpoint
Find a current political claim — a policy argument, a piece of rhetoric, an appeal to national interest or common sense. Identify the ideological work it is doing. What does it make seem natural? What does it conceal? Use at least one framework from this unit explicitly.
11
Democracy's Vulnerabilities — Tocqueville Revisited
Time
Legitimacy
Anchor: Tocqueville, Democracy in America — Vol. II, Pt. 2 Ch. 4 (on associations); Pt. 4 Ch. 6–7 (returned)
We return to Tocqueville. You have now read Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Gramsci, Arendt, Foucault, and Weber. Re-read the soft despotism passage. What do you see now that you didn't see in Session 1? Tocqueville's argument about voluntary associations as the antidote to democratic atomization — and why the erosion of civic life makes soft despotism more likely. Cross-link: AMST-210 develops the contemporary case study of democratic erosion in detail.
The second reading is the course's test. Something in the passage should have shifted.
12
Populism and Its Uses — The Theory and the Practice
Legitimacy
Time
Reading: Mudde & Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction — Ch. 1–3
Reading: Cas Mudde, "The Populist Zeitgeist" (essay)
Populism as a political logic, not a political position: the pure people vs. the corrupt elite, the claim that the will of the people is being thwarted by some internal or external enemy. Populism is available to the left and to the right. It is a form of politics, not a set of policies. Understanding populism as a thin ideology that can attach to any thicker content is the analytical move. The question worth staying in: when is a populist claim a legitimate democratic challenge, and when is it a cover for something else?
Every populist movement claims to speak for the real people. The question is always: who gets to define "the people," and who gets excluded from that definition.
13
Rights, Power, and Who Enforces Them
Resistance
Legitimacy
Reading: Arendt, "The Rights of Man: What Are They?" (essay)
Reading: King, "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (free)
Rights don't enforce themselves. Arendt's argument about the "right to have rights": the practical problem with universal human rights is that they only work when a political community backs them. Stateless people, refugees, and those outside the protection of citizenship discover this quickly. King's Letter is applied political theory — it uses natural law, social contract theory, and direct action simultaneously. Read it not as a historical document but as a demonstration of how to work with the ideas in this course when the stakes are real.
A right that no one enforces is a wish. King's Letter is about the gap between the wish and the political fact, and what to do about it.
14
The Limits of Reform — When Does Working Inside the System Fail?
Resistance
Structure
Reading: Thoreau, "Resistance to Civil Government" (public domain)
Reading: Arendt, "Civil Disobedience" (essay)
Reading: Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (essay)
Three different answers to the question of when reform from within fails. Thoreau: individual conscience above the law, the duty to refuse. Arendt: civil disobedience as a collective political act with a legal history, not a personal moral statement. Lorde: the structural critique — the tools of reform are themselves shaped by the system they're meant to change, and using them may reproduce what you're trying to dismantle. These three positions don't reconcile. All three are useful. The question is situational.
The question isn't whether to work inside or outside the system. The question is what you're trying to achieve, and which path gets you there — and what you become in the process.
15
Return to Start — The Convenience You Named in Week 1
Time
Return: Tocqueville, Democracy in America — Vol. II, Pt. 4, Ch. 6–7
Re-read the Tocqueville passage from Session 1. Then re-read the convenience you named. Now answer: have you decided to accept it? On what terms? This is not a rhetorical question. It is the course's closing assignment. There is no right answer — a fully informed, explicit acceptance is as valid as refusal. What the course asked for is that you see it clearly. The difference between your Session 1 answer and your Session 15 answer is the course.
You now have a vocabulary — legitimacy, hegemony, ideology, governmentality, soft despotism — for something you experienced before you had words for it. That's what political theory is for.
Unit III Checkpoint
"The patterns run." Name one political pattern you can now see that you couldn't name before this course. Where does it show up? What would it take to break it — and what would the theorists in this course say about whether that's possible?
What You'll Read
Foundations — all public domain
- Hobbes — Leviathan (selections) Free
- Locke — Second Treatise (selections) Free
- Rousseau — The Social Contract, Books I–II Free
- Tocqueville — Democracy in America (selections) Free
- Marx & Engels — German Ideology; Communist Manifesto Pt. I Free
- Thoreau — Resistance to Civil Government Free
20th Century
- Gramsci — Prison Notebooks (selections) Library / purchase
- Althusser — "Ideological State Apparatuses" Library / purchase
- Arendt — Origins of Totalitarianism (selections) Library / purchase
- Weber — "Politics as a Vocation" Free, widely available
- Foucault — Discipline & Punish, Ch. 3 Library / purchase
- King — Letter from Birmingham Jail Free
Contemporary
- Eagleton — Ideology: An Introduction, Ch. 1 Library / purchase
- Mudde & Kaltwasser — Populism: A Very Short Introduction Library / purchase
- Lorde — "The Master's Tools…" (essay) Widely available
- Arendt — "Civil Disobedience" (essay) Library / purchase
📚 Get the Books
The purchasable texts from this course are available as a curated list on Bookshop.org. Independent bookstores, one click.
View Reading List →
Assessment
A note on the writing
These assignments are designed to be written by you, without an AI. Not as a rule — as a method. Political theory requires you to sit with an argument until it becomes uncomfortable. An LLM will resolve that discomfort immediately. That's exactly the part you needed. If you use one anyway, I'll use one to respond. The feedback will be accurate, and will have missed the point entirely.
Per Session
Boop Log
One entry per session. Name the argument. Name what it gets right. Name where it fails. No summary. No reporting. The boop is the thing.
Per Unit
Unit Checkpoint
One response to the checkpoint prompt at the end of each unit. Two pages max. Apply the frameworks. Show the work.
Session 15
Return
Re-read Session 1. Answer the original prompt again. Name the convenience and your terms for accepting it. Not submitted — kept by the student.
3 Units
Certificate of Completion
Complete all three units — boop logs and checkpoints — and the course is complete. A certificate is issued.
Mobocoin Ledger
Boop logs (15 sessions)+15 MC
Unit checkpoints (3 units)+6 MC
Course completion+5 MC
Total Available
26 MC
A Note on This Course
Political theory has a strange status in contemporary education. It gets taught as intellectual history — Hobbes said this, Locke said that, here are the dates. That's not what this course is. These are not historical positions. They are analytical tools. The theorists in this course were trying to explain what they saw happening around them, and what they saw was real. What they saw is also still happening.
The course is organized to arrive at the present, not retreat from it. Every session connects to something you can see outside. By the end, you should be able to read a news story, a policy speech, a social media argument, and identify the political logic operating in it — not to win an argument about it, but to see it more clearly than you did before. That's the only ambition.
— Faculty TBD · Institute for Systems and Power
Connections — Ring 1 and beyond
POLS-101 is the theoretical foundation for several other courses. It provides the vocabulary for power, legitimacy, and resistance that shows up across the curriculum. It receives its cognitive science underpinning from COGN-120 (why humans misread power dynamics) and its systems logic from APMA-115 (how power cascades through networks).
