CSP 70 Japan and Korea Through Film and Fiction

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville gives a picture of the people who governed themselves in America as self-important, anti-intellectual, racist religious zealots who were mostly driven by self-interest with little concern for the public’s interest.  Yet, Tocqueville also claimed that when these vile individuals constituted a public in the New England townships with the aim of carrying out public business, the virtues of American democracy were made manifest. This course will take as a starting point Tocqueville’s insight about the secret of a nascent American democracy – the New England’s townships, a particular kind of democratic public that unleashes the virtue of democracy through the natural vice of its people – to examine the possibility of democratic publics in restoring American democracy in the twenty-first century.  The class will be devoted to reading political and philosophical texts that suggest that the shape and function of our public spheres, counter-publics, and political spaces are essential for the preservation of democracy.  There will also be a community-based component of the class that requires students to critically engage and actually participate in a democratic public in Los Angeles.