Office: UCA 363
Office Hours: MWF 8:00-8:50 a.m., MW 11:00-11:50 a.m. & by appointment
Texas State University Academic Calendar
Texas State University Final Exam Schedule

Selected Web Resources For Texas State University
Texas State University Library
Locating Periodicals @ Texas State University Library

Class Participation, Oral Presentations, Exams, Papers, Grades
1. This course will be conducted as a seminar.  Students must attend every class meeting and be prepared to discuss assigned readings and other materials.  Active participation in class discussion is essential.  Course grades will be determined by oral presentations, class participation, written papers, and exams
2. Determinants of Course Grade: Oral Reports & Presentations 25%/ Seminar Participation 15%/ Essay Exams/Papers 60%

Attendance
1. Two (2) unexcused absences are permitted.  Students with three (3) unexcused absences will have their course grade lowered by one letter grade.  Students who have four (4) unexcused absences will have their course grade lowered by two letter grades.  No absences beyond four (4) for any reason are permitted.  Any student who has more than four
 absences is likely to fail the course and, therefore, should withdraw from the course.
2. The instructor for the course is not responsible for bringing students who have missed class "up-to-date" on missed material.  Each student has the responsibility to remain current with respect to class material.

Note On Course & Syllabus Materials: Students may find books, articles, links, websites, and other materials provided in this syllabus useful and of interest. Their listing in this syllabus, including those which are required and recommended, does not necessarily indicate endorsement of or agreement with any views or positions on any issues found in these materials, websites, or on other sites to which they may provide links.

Note On Access To Articles:  Access to articles through the Texas State University Library, @ Locating Periodicals @ Texas State University Library available to all Texas State University students, requires a valid User Name and a Password.  Many of the links in this syllabus provide direct access to the article.

Password Protected Materials: Some materials on this web syllabus are password protected and are directly accessible @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html. These materials are for student use. The password will be provided to students in the course.
 
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course is an introduction to the relationship between political behavior and human motivation.  Topics covered include: conceptual and methodological concerns; psychological perspectives and political theory; power and personality; the psychological burdens of freedom and their relationship to authority and individual will; illusion, reality, and the political order; symbols and political quiescence; the psychology of empire; and psychological insights into political behavior offered by fiction and film.

PURPOSE OF COURSE
The purpose of this course is to provide an additional dimension to the student's understanding of the universe of politics. To the rational, and widely taken for granted, model of political behavior, the spirit of which is nicely captured by Harold Lasswell's well known definition of politics as "who gets what, when, how", this course offers an alternative model of the universe of politics.  It is a model of political behavior which examines the "irrational", the world of human emotions and human personality, as they relate to and influence this behavior.  Political Psychology, as it is generally known, is a well established field in the discipline of Political Science.

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Course Title: Politics & Personality/Political Psychology

Overview Of Course
Topics
I. Introduction
II. Freud - Instinctual Drives & Civilization
III. Personality & Politics
IV.  Political Leaders & Followers
V.  The Political Psychology of Terrorism
VI. Dostoevsky - Religion, Authority, Freedom,  & Individual Will
VII.  The Matrix: Illusion, Reality, & Freedom
VIII.  Edelman - Symbols, Symbolic Reassurance, And Political Quiescence
IX. The Paranoid Style & Conspiracy Thinking
X.  The Psychology Of Empire

II. Freud - Instinctual Drives & Civilization 
A view of "human nature" in ancient Athens:
"Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion,human nature, always ready to offend(emphasis added)  even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colours, as something  incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself..."

These are the observations of Thucydides [c. 460 - 400 BCE], the ancient Greek historian and student of political behavior, with regard to "The Civil War In Corcyra 427 [BCE]" in: Thucydides, History Of The Peloponnesian War (Rex Warner Translation/Introduction & Notes By M. I. Finley/Penguin Classics/1972), p. 245.

Readings: Freud, Civilization And Its Discontents, the entire monograph.

All students in this course should download and print for their personal use a hard copy of "A Partial Glossary Of Freud".  This glossary can be accessed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.   Scroll to the section on "Political Psychology" and look for "A Partial Glossary Of Freud".  This location is password protected.  Password and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.

Wilfred M. McClay/The Moral Economy of Guilt/First Things, May 2011, No. 213.
Texas State University Library permalink. A valid Texas State University User Name and password are required.
Abstract:
The article explores the contribution of cultural process in the emergence of sense of guilt. According to the author, the advancement in civilization contributed to the heightening of the sense of guilt which made the people lose their happiness. He adds that religions in the world are trying to save the people from the sin of guilt. He stresses that the ability to feel guilt is one of the attributes of people. He also mentions the therapeutic unreality of guilt, which can be something illusory and omnipresent and the concept of forgiveness.
"In his grand and gloomy book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud identified the tenacious sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization. In fact, he
continued, it seems that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt." (boldface added)

Dinah M. Mendes, "Totem and Tefillin", Azure, No. 44, Spring 2011. Review of: Arnold D. Richards (ed.), The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity (McFarland 2010).

Russell Jacoby/Bloodlust: Why we should fear our neighbors more than strangers/The Chronicle Review, March 27, 2011.
Texas State University Library permalink.  A valid Texas State University User Name and password are required for access.

"The proposition that violence derives from kith and kin overturns a core liberal belief that we assault and are assaulted by those who are strangers to us. If that were so, the solution would be at hand: Get to know the stranger. Talk with the stranger. Reach out. The cure for violence is better communication, perhaps better education. Study foreign cultures and peoples. Unfortunately, however, our brother, our neighbor, enrages us precisely because we understand him. Cain knew his brother—he "talked with Abel his brother"—and slew him afterward.
...
We don't like this truth. We prefer to fear strangers. We like to believe that fundamental differences pit people against one another, that world hostilities are driven by antagonistic principles about how society should be constituted.
...
We hate the neighbor we are enjoined to love. Why? Why do small disparities between people provoke greater hatred than the large ones? Perhaps the work of Freud helps chart the underground sources of fratricidal violence. Freud introduced the phrase the narcissism of minor differences to describe this phenomenon. He noted that it is precisely the little dissimilarities in persons who are otherwise alike that arouse feelings of strangeness and enmity between them." (Freud's words are in italics.)  [Boldface added.]

World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Cross-pressured partisans are willing to reassess their expected support for their party’s nominee if they come to believe that an issue about which they disagree with their party is at stake in the election. These voters might find the salience of a conflicting issue increased by real-world events or personal experiences, but a political campaign can also activate a policy disagreement by highlighting the candidates’ differences on the issue and calling attention to one’s own party’s failings and the opposition’s virtues on the issue.

Finally, the third myth that we challenge in our analysis is the enduring conventional wisdom that persuadable voters are the least admirable segment of the electorate—poorly informed and lacking in policy attitudes. The prevailing perception about the persuadable segment of the electorate is that 'its level of information is low, its sense of political involvement is slight, its level of political participation is not high.'⁷ It is thought that these muddled voters make up their minds on the basis of nonpolicy considerations, like candidate personality, charisma, and the 'guy you’d wanna drink a beer with' criteria. In contrast, our theory suggests that policy issues are often central to how persuadable voters make up their minds. To be clear, this book is not a polemical account of an American populace composed of ideal citizens highly engaged and fully informed across all policy domains. Rather, we argue simply that for those voters who find themselves at odds with their party nominee it is the campaign that often helps to determine whether partisan loyalties or issue preferences are given greater weight in their vote decision".

Lera Boroditsky/How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think?/www.edge.org/June 12, 2009
"For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity." (boldface added)

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IV.  Political Leaders & Followers
1. Personality of Leaders & Political Behavior
a. Political Leaders
Readings: 
(Revisited) Lasswell, "The Political Personality"; George, "Power as a Compensatory Value for Political Leaders".

Aileen Kelly, "Why They Believed in Stalin", The New York Review of Books, April 26, 2007, Vol. LIV, No. 7, pp. 58-62.  A review essay on Tear Off the Masks: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton University Press, 2007) by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Harvard University Press 2007) by Jochen Hellbeck. 
The Kelly article can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.  Scroll to the section on "Political Psychology" and look for "Aileen Kelly: Why They Believed in Stalin".  This location is password protected.  Password and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.

"... the Soviet notion of selfhood had deep roots in a different cultural tradition which did not recognize the same dichotomy of public and private. Lack of historical perspective is a major flaw in Fitzpatrick's book. The "new man" was not, as Fitzpatrick implies, a concept invented by the Soviet regime. It was central to a tradition of introspection and moral self-perfecting that arose in the early nineteenth century as a response to the dilemma of the Russian intelligentsia whose talents were frustrated in their benighted country, and whose longing for personal fulfillment was combined with a strong commitment to social justice. From Enlightenment rationalism, German romantic philosophy, and French utopian socialism many educated Russians absorbed a vision of history as a collective process leading to the fullest self-realization of man through the healing of all painful divisions between individuals and the social whole.
... In the worst years of Stalinism many maintained their faith in the Party's infallibility by developing a dual consciousness. As Stephen Kotkin explains, for Soviet citizens the discrepancies between lived experience and revolutionary ideology based ultimately on theory seem to have given rise to a dual reality: life could resemble 'a split existence: sometimes in one truth, sometimes in the other.' Even when theoretical 'truth' was contradicted by common sense, it still formed an integral part of everyday existence; without an understanding of it, citizens found it impossible to know what was permitted and what not. But acceptance of the truthfulness of the revolutionary truth also fulfilled another function: 'it was also,' Kotkin writes, 'a way to transcend the pettiness of daily life, to see the whole picture, to relate mundane events to a larger design; it offered something to strive for.' True believers (boldface added) could explain away the worst excesses of Stalinism by viewing the present from the perspective of eschatological time. In this form of secular religiosity, history, like Providence, was seen to move in mysterious ways; when the goal was attained it would become clear that policies and actions which now seemed objectionable or senseless all had their place in the overall grand design.
... The diaries Hellbeck has selected are especially significant for the light they shed on an aspect of the Soviet mentality under Stalin which, as he notes, Western readers find particularly challenging: the acceptance of violence in the service of self-realization. We see at first hand the operation, chilling and sometimes poignant, of the dual consciousness that allowed many to accept the mass slaughter of collectivization and the Terror and to justify the violence inflicted on them and those they cherished for crimes they did not commit.
... His study adds an important dimension to the work done by other scholars to throw light on the psychological reasons behind the collusion of moral idealists in the extreme violence of the Stalin years.  He concludes by reminding us that the modes of thought that encouraged Soviet citizens to accept violence in the service of self-realization were not specific to the Soviet Union or the political left.  (boldface added) In the first half of the last century the attraction of movements promising fulfillment through an all-embracing worldview led intellectuals across Europe such as Ernst Jünger and Georges Sorel to extol the morally and aesthetically purifying effects of political violence."

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)
Film clip from "The Prime of Miss Jean Brody":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m-3SgRKnB0
This film is based on the novel Muriel Spark/The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
James Wood/ The Prime of Ms. Muriel Spark/Atlantic Monthly, November 2004, Vol. 294, Issue 4.
Texas State University Library permalink. A valid Texas State University User Name and password are required for access
For an analysis of the life and works of Muriel Spark, see: Roger Kimball/Muriel Spark, 1918-2006/newcriterion.com/April 4, 2006

Readings:
Joel Brodkin/The First Neoconservative: Herman Wouk, the Americanization of the Holocaust, and the Rise of Neoconservatism/New Politics/Summer 2005/Vol. X No. 3.
(See Brodkin's remarks on The Caine Mutiny.)

V.  The Political Psychology of Terrorism
1. Psychological Sources of Terrorism
Readings:
Michael J. Mazarr/The Psychological Sources of Islamic Terrorism/Policy Review, June-July 2004, No. 125.

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VI. Dostoevsky - Religion, Authority, Freedom,  & Individual Will
Readings: Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor
Film: "The Brothers Karamazov"  The Brothers Karamazov (1958)

Caitrin Nicol/Brave New World at 75/The New Atlantis/No. 16, Spring 2007
"Huxley’s most famous novel, Brave New World, was published in 1932, and the occasion of this seventy-fifth anniversary should lead us to wonder about his peculiar description of how we understand the future. We live in a time of biotechnological leaps forward that have made the term “Brave New World” almost a reflex for commentators worried we are rushing headlong toward a sterilized post-human society, engineered to joyless joy. It is easy to imagine that we see the shadows of our society in Huxley’s vision of the future. But could it be that our insistence on seeing Huxley’s book as an exceedingly successful prophecy actually prevents us from recognizing its real insight? Is there a way for us to understand the book free of the great distorting influence of our own times? We can do that only by reading the book on its own terms, as its first readers did, and by letting ourselves be guided by the literary, scientific, and cultural critics of Huxley’s day. In doing so, we may glimpse afresh something of the meaning of Brave New World in its author’s mind and time.  ...
...  This 'illusion of freedom' was cast into a clearer light by a reviewer who discerned that the temptation to sacrifice liberty to end suffering often becomes an attack on the reality of the liberty itself. Rebecca West, a prominent novelist and literary critic ... said Huxley had 'rewritten in terms of our age' Dostoevsky’s famous parable of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov—a 'symbolic statement that every generation ought to read afresh.' (boldface  added)
...
By shifting the question from political control to personal conscience, West’s reading anticipated the decentralized way that many of the particular scientific and cultural furnishings of Huxley’s world have made appearances in ours.  ... the separation of sex from procreation, and love from sex; the consumption-saturated culture threatening to commodify the consumers; the increasingly physico-chemical attempt to explain and treat a troubled psyche—we did not need bureaucratic threats or hypnopaedic repetitions to want these things, and in this sense Huxley profoundly overestimated (or is it underestimated?) mankind, and his book may, in the deepest sense, have gotten our present all wrong. We chose these things ourselves, uncoerced by terror or war or social engineers. They have been developed to respond to real human hurts and desires; and, as might be expected of human choices, the results and motives have been mixed."

Note: The text of Brave New World is accessible on the Web @ this location.

John Tierney/Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch/NYT/August 14, 2007 (with links to related articles)

Ronald Bailey/Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets?/Reason/September 11, 2007
"By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative?"

“The Rapture of the nerds"? John Markoff/The Coming Superbrain (w/links to related materials)/NYT Week in Review, Sunday, May 24, 2009
Artificial intelligence is back in fashion, which raises the question: Will computer intelligence surpass our own

2. Erich Fromm - Escape From Freedom
Readings:
Fromm, Escape From Freedom Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, & Appendix.
Lakshmi Chaudry/Mirror, Mirror On the Web/The Nation/January 29, 2007, Vol. 284 Issue 4, p19-22, 4p. (pdf)
Texas State University Library permalink. A valid Texas State University User Name and password are required for access.
Abstract:
The article discusses the obsession with being famous, a desire shared by many of the generation born between 1970-2000, and expressed through media such as MySpace.com, reality television, and Internet blogging. Referred to as "micro-celebrity," the author contends that the craze to be famous or recognized on a mass scale is fueled by ego-centrism and self-focus instead of actual achievement.
Note Chaudry's observations on fame.

Recommended
The Erich Fromm Society

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Yet the word nobody wants to own, the all-purpose put-down of the political moment, has a meaningful, indeed proud, heritage that hardly anyone seems to know or to honor. Only within black church circles can one, to this day, still hear Come By Here with the profundity that Mr. Gordon did almost a century ago."

IX. The Paranoid Style & Conspiracy Thinking
1. The Paranoid Style In American Politics: Richard Hofstadter
Readings: Richard Hofstadter/The Paranoid Style In American Politics, Introduction & pp.  3-92.
Richard Hofstadter/The Paranoid Style In American Politics (An essay which addresses a number of the themes in his book)/Harper's/November 1964
For background on Hofstadter and his work, see: David Greenberg/Richard Hofstadter: The pundits' favorite historian/slate.com/June 7, 2006

On conspiracy thinking, see: Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (University of California Press 2003)
See Chapter Five of Michael Barkun's book @ http://www.ucpress.edu/excerpt.php?isbn=9780520248120#readchapter5.

Learning and teaching take place best in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and openness. All members of the academic community are responsible for supporting freedom and openness through rigorous personal standards of honesty and fairness. Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty undermine the very purpose of the university and diminish the value of an education.
Academic Offenses
Students who have committed academic dishonesty, which includes cheating on an examination or other academic work to be submitted, plagiarism, collusion, or abuse of resource materials, are subject to disciplinary action.
a. Academic work means the preparation of an essay, thesis, report, problem assignments, or other projects which are to be submitted for purposes of grade determination.
b. Cheating means:
1. Copying from another student?s test paper, laboratory report, other report or computer files, data listing, and/or programs.
2. Using materials during a test unauthorized by person giving test.
3. Collaborating, without authorization, with another person during an examination or in preparing academic work.
4. Knowingly, and without authorization, using, buying, selling, stealing, transporting, soliciting, copying, or possessing, in whole or part, the content of an unaministered test.
5. Substituting for another student?or permitting another person to substitute for oneself in taking an exam or preparing academic work.
6. Bribing another person to obtain an unadministered test or information about an unadministered test.
c. Plagiarism means the appropriation of another?s work and the unacknowledged incorporation of that work in one?s own written work offered for credit. (Underline Added)
d. Collusion means the unauthorized collaboration with another person in preparing written work offered for credit.
e. Abuse of resource materials means the mutilation, destruction, concealment, theft or alteration of materials provided to assist students in the mastery of course materials.
Penalties for Academic Dishonesty
Students who have committeed academic dishonesty may be subject to:
a. Academic penalty including one or more of the following when not inconsistent:
1. A requirement to perform additional academic work not required of other students in the course;
2. Required to withdraw from the course with a grade of F.(Underline Added)
3. A reduction to any level grade in the course, or on the exam or other academic work affected by the academic dishonesty.
b. Disciplinary penalty including any penalty which may be imposed in a student disciplinary hearing pursuant to this Code of Conduct.

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