While doing exegetical analysis of at least two theorists from the list of readings, construct and argue a thesis about one of the following issues:
Issue #1: Black Reconstruction and the persistance of racist systems in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Issue #2: The role of class power in grasping the dynamic forces of society and envisioning a more just world.
Issue #3: The relationship between prisons, the police, and poverty and/ or their social function.
Issue #4: The role of discipline, surveillance, and the panopticon in modern society.
Issue #5: The characteristics of the fascist personality, fascist propoganda devices, and how to resist their spread.
Issue #6: The link between liberal capitalism and heroic-folkish ideology.
Issue #7: How anti-democratic tendencies form, are reproduced, and spread.
Issue #8: The function of law in antogonistic society.
Issue #9: The different forms of feminism and what type of ethics or politics is needed in the face of the reactionary threat.
Issue #10: The significance or implications of an intersectional conception of oppression.
Issue #11: The critique of liberal reformism (e.g., concerning the police, concerning the criminal justice system, concerning corporate power).
Issue #12: White (male) ressentiment in the American context of decline.
Issue #13: The ethical and political consequences of the neoliberalization of society (e.g., preditory debt, colonizing expanded reproduction, privatization, mass poverty).
Issue #14: How to resist patriarchy and/ or racialized capitalism.
Issue #15: The ethico-political consequences of climate disaster.
Issue #16: The indissolubility between ethics, philosophy, and society.
Issue #17: How accumulation by dispossession works.
Issue #18: Choose your own topic. If you choose this option, you are required to submit a thesis statement for approval before writing. When conceiving of your topic, be sure to address how you will incorporate exegetical analysis.
Guidelines:
1). Be sure to quote several passages while doing exegetical analysis.
2). Quoting passages does not make your explanation self-evident, however. Go the further step of explaining why the quote you’ve cited makes the distinction it makes. Said another way, show the reader how it is that specific words illustrate the point that you think Marx is making.
3). Do not just repeat what Kant says. Attempt to put his argument into your own words.
4). Follow out the presuppositions that are not explicit in the text. In other words, certain connections or logical premises will be necessary for Hegel’s argument to work, even though he does not straightforwardly state them. Attempt to flesh out the underlying assumptions that synthesize his argument as a whole.
5). Be generous in your thoughts. There is often more that can be said. Making the point with variations often helps to show that you understand the argument.
6). Assume that your audience or reader knows nothing about the topic. That is, imagine that you are writing to someone who knows nothing about philosophy.
7). Have an introductory paragraph with a thesis statement that clearly designates what your view is and how you will go about arguing it. Have a concluding paragraph that restates your thesis and rounds off what you have accomplished along the way.
8). Your paper should be 5 to 6 pages in length, in Times New Roman, double spaced.
9). Following the grading rubric, provide a short paragraph that describes what grade you think you deserve.
Sources/Readings:
Marcuse: “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State”
Du Bois: Black Reconstruction in America, 671-708
Adorno: “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas,” 11-37
Foucault: “Panopticism,” 195-228
Melossi: The Prison and the Factory, 27-82
Vitale: The End of Policing, “The Police are not here to Protect you”
James: “Radicalizing Feminism”
Butler: Gender Trouble, 1-34
Wang: “Racialized Accumulation by Dispossession in the Age of Finance Capital,” 99-150
Neale: “Social Collapse and Climate Breakdown”
ABSOLUTELY NO LATE PAPERS WILL BE ACCEPTED
Sample Solution
