Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course begins with the emergence of capitalism and industrialization in Europe, particularly in England, as opposed to countries like China. The first part of the course reviews and discusses the main theses that relates to given chapters in the theory of economic growth: trade and market integration, property rights and wage labor, institutions and state-building, finance, and colonialism. The second part of the course analyzes Western capitalism at its height and how it structured a new, integrated, global economy. This course also covers the issue of late industrialization and economic catch-up in the emerging economies at that time, such as Germany, before moving into the global goods and capital markets, colonization and imperialism, and the underlying fault-lines at work during the First Global Era that surfaced in the years immediately before and after World War I.

The course investigates a variety of topics including the concept of global environmental governance, the development of institutions and norms governing the protection of the environment. It places special focus on key principles of international environmental law, multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), cooperation among States and the growing significance of non-State actors (subnational governments, nongovernmental organizations, business and corporations), and the diversity of regulatory approaches and related policy tools. The course includes guest lecturers who share their experience working in international institutions.

This interdisciplinary course provides a comprehensive introduction to energy security, touching upon economic markets, political strategy, and even technological developments. It introduces global trends in energy supply and demand, exchanges, and prices. It provides an overview of the diversity of measures taken to promote energy security, with a specific emphasis on the European Union and member states. Finally, the course considers scenarios for the future in the context of calls for an energy transition.

This course introduces classical music and the first quality of a good musician: knowing how to listen. In addition to acquiring a broader musical culture, the course develops listening, concentration, and analytical skills. By means of key works from the repertoire, the main forms of Western classical music are approached, from the Baroque age to contemporary music. The course also discusses the many ways of playing the orchestra. This diversity constitutes a veritable musical laboratory, but also a social one. In this regard, the orchestra is a valuable tool for better understanding what “the collective” entails: knowing how to listen to others in order to play better together. Students give an individual presentation of an analysis of a work of their choice, share listening comments, and complete a group project based on symphonic or lyrical music (concert report or recording), musicians (portraits, interviews), or concert halls (reportage), and is produced using various media: musical, literary, photographic, theatrical, digital (video, audio recording), et cetera.

This course offers an introduction to antitrust as a mechanism for keeping private power under control. It goes beyond black letter law and integrates legal rules within the broader societal and historical developments that have shaped their enactment and evolution. Instead of discussing antitrust as a set-in-stone collection of rules and case law, the course presents antitrust as a living body that adapts to changes in technology, ideology, and politics.

This is a beginner level French language course for students who have previously completed one or two semesters of French. The course focuses on understanding commonly used vocabulary words and very frequent expressions concerning oneself, the family, and the concrete environment, provided that people speak slowly and distinctly. It covers common names and words as well as very simple sentences, for example those in advertisements, posters, and catalogs. The course builds skills to communicate in a simple way, ask and answer simple questions about familiar subjects or objects of immediate need, use expressions and simple sentences to describe where one lives and the people one knows; and write short, simple postcards and provide personal details on a questionnaire or hotel registration form. Topics include adjectives, possessive and demonstrative pronouns, recent past, past tense, and imperfect past; expressions of time, start, end, intervals, length, interrogative, imperative, present conditional, comparative and superlative, future, near, and simple.

Based on the most recent research, this class retraces the modern history of homosexuality in European and American societies since the late eighteenth century, not only as an individual and collective experience, but also as a medical and theoretical concept, and a social battlefield. The progression is roughly chronological but also focuses on specific issues such as the legal situation of homosexuals, the medical and psychological discourses on homosexuality, the common ground and differences between the history of male and female homosexuality, the role of art, literature, and urban life in shaping homosexual identity and subculture. The course considers how and why Western countries shifted from condemnation to acceptation, though past prejudice and stigma still interfere with the present.

This introductory course in social psychology presents the methodological and theoretical issues of the discipline through the acquisition of historical, empirical, and analytical reference points. It explores major issues specific to contemporary societies, such as the formation of norms, social identity, and submission to authority. In particular, the course focuses on the phenomena known as “crowd psychology,” at the crossroads of individual and collective psychology. It explores the specific issues and reasoning in "crowd psychology" through authors, trends, and concrete experiences.