I’ve been discussing these texts all semester with a very intense and dedicated group of students. In our final discussions, we are considering the following questions (or as many as we have time for):

1. What are the roles of reasoning and/or deliberation (Mill, Dewey, Arendt, Habermas), as opposed to unconscious emotions and/or interests (Freud, Adorno) in modern politics?
2. How do complex mass societies manage information, and how should they? Options include bureaucracies (Weber), free speech (Mill), price signals (Hayek), organic intellectuals (Gramsci), corporate propaganda (Horkheimer & Adorno), small-scale politics (Arendt), surveillance (Foucault), or institutions of civil society (Dewey, Habermas).
3. What causal factors are important in history? E.g., class struggle (Marx, Gramsci), Darwinian selection among ideas and institutions (Hayek, Weber, Foucault), intentional deliberation and learning (Mill, Dewey), great men (Mussolini), or conflicts among enemies (Schmitt, Mussolini, perhaps Fanon).
4. What is the potential of direct democratic self-rule as understood by Marx (in “The Civil War in France”), Luxemburg, duBois, Dewey, Arendt, or Fanon? What are its likely limitations, according to Schmitt, or Weber, or Habermas? How does decentralized democracy compare to market decentralization (Hayek)?
5. How should we think about positive and negative liberty (Berlin) in the light of other accounts of freedom by, e.g., DuBois, Foucault, or de Beauvoir?
6. What defines “liberalism” and how does it look from the perspective of a class revolutionary (Gramsci), a Black American thinker (DuBois), a revolutionary colonial subject (Fanon), or a woman (de Beauvoir)?
7. In 1945, Arendt wrote, “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” What, if anything, does evil mean in the context of earthly politics? Should we talk about evil?
8. What can political thinkers contribute? E.g., a prophetic voice (Marx, Benjamin, possibly Dewey, possibly de Beauvoir), detached analysis (Weber, early Foucault, perhaps Horkheimer and Adorno), or concrete involvements in public life (Dewey, Gramsci, DuBois, Fanon, late Foucault).
9. Are the questions of the 21^st century different from those of the 20^th?