APUC11013 - Democracy and the Conspiratorial: Theorizing Hidden Power in Classical Athens

Course Description

In recent years, writers around the globe have declared the twenty-first century a golden age of conspiracy theory and democratic instability. But few have addressed a pressing question that precedes and complicates this conclusion: What if thinking conspiratorially about democracy could offer new strategies for understanding and practicing it? Are there narratives about democratic power from earlier periods of epistemic crisis that might help us be less presentist in our thinking about conspiracy? This course exposes the frequent, but often overlooked, engagement with conspiratorial thinking, secret plots, and subversive hidden networks in the prose and poetry of Athenian democracy to demonstrate how thinkers like Plato saw a creative and permanent entanglement between the idea and practice of conspiracy and the idea and practice of democracy.

Notes

Online registration deadline: Feb. 1, 5 PM CT

Remote courses require you to login to Canvas to access the Zoom Classroom. You will receive an invitation to join Canvas about a week before your course begins. Please visit the Liberal Arts Student Resources page to find step by step instructions for Canvas and Zoom: Online Learning Resources