France

This course analyzes prior constitutions and political events that led to the birth of the Fifth Republic. It then offers an in-depth study of constitutional law mechanisms to better understand the institutional framework of a working democracy and current trends in government. The course is divided into five parts: history of the Fifth Republic, the executive, parliament, the judiciary and constitutional justice, and the European Union constitutional law. 

This course examines how people mobilize certain values to think and act while at the same time disagreeing over their definition, ranking, and translation into norms that organize the legal, social, and political world. The course uses political theory to provide concepts, principles, categories, and arguments to navigate through these conflicting normative aspirations. The course addresses questions of how to be coherent while having different values, beliefs, and practices; where to bridge the gap between ideal political principle and current institutions; whether there are acceptable trade-offs between conflicting values or conflicting interpretations of values; and why and how some values are politicized and weaponized.

This course presents the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the most influential British philosopher of the nineteenth century and a central figure in the liberal tradition of political thought. ON LIBERTY (1859), his most widely known work and one which no student of political philosophy can afford to ignore, is a cornerstone of classical liberal theory; and THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN (1869) constitutes a pioneering application of the theory—and of Mill's empiricism—to the question of equality between the sexes. The course proceeds in an orderly fashion through all five chapters of ON LIBERTY before turning to a thorough reading of THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN, making regular pauses to put Mill's thought in broader perspective against the general background of his empiricist philosophy, as well as the historical place of his thought within the liberal tradition.