History

This course examines the theory, study and writing of History, and includes an analysis of the changes in the methods, assumptions and purposes of historical investigation over time. It covers the development of the discipline of History; methodological themes connected to History in order to demonstrate how historical materials, interviews, etc., and perspectives can come together in the production of History; research methods; and the basics of historical composition writing.

Contemporary political debate remains indebted to concepts and arguments developed in the history of political thought. This course explores this history by examining a select number of signal figures and movements in the history of modern Western political thought. Students engage in close, critical reading of canonical texts. Students learn how to accurately interpret and critically evaluate the arguments in those texts, and thereby learn how to deal with the legacy those arguments have left for contemporary debates.
Thinkers to be studied might range from the well-known and canonical to the lesser-known and unjustly neglected. Possible figures might include: Thomas Hobbes, Montesquieu, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Catharine Macaulay, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, G. W. F. Hegel, Flora Tristan, J. S. Mill, Frederick Douglass, and Karl Marx. Possible movements to be examined include: social contract theory; natural rights theory; republicanism and civic virtue; feminism and the rights of women; socialism and the emancipation of workers; and abolitionism and the emancipation of slaves. 

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. Through the critical review of classical theories of capitalism, students discuss both fixed and invariant elements in the development of modern capitalism and what makes peculiar its contemporary forms. Students examine some of the most important concepts in present intellectual and political debate, such as globalization, financialization, etc. The course begins with a historical and theoretical framing of the question regarding the peculiarity of contemporary capitalism, briefly considering some of the most influential classical approaches to the study of capitalism. The course subsequently focuses on more recent debates and examines several proposals to conceptually grasp the specific capitalist formation that began to take shape in the early 1970s. Such concepts as flexible accumulation and late capitalism, the knowledge economy and neoliberalism, cognitive and postcolonial capitalism, Empire and postfordism, "racial capitalism" and feminist critique of political economy are critically discussed. The course then focuses on the so-called "platform capitalism." Taking platforms both as emerging business model and as a political form the course investigates their origins in the intertwined domains of logistics and digitization. It then focuses on the operations of some of the most important platforms - from Uber to Amazon, from Deliveroo to Airbnb - and discusses their implications both for the transformation of urban spaces and for labor (introducing such notions as "algorithmic management" and "digital labor"). In general, platforms are taken both as a specific research object and as a lens that allows discerning wider tendencies in the development of contemporary capitalism.