POLI4934 · Political Science

Honors Seminar

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

This course is restricted to Political Science Honors Program seniors and juniors by permission only.Honors Seminar: Pre-Modern Politics. Modern political life is mostly defined by state institutions and national identities. Yet the modern nation-state is a relatively recent political development in human society, comprising less than half of a millennium of human history. Until the modern era, the organization of political power tended to be more personalized and less institutionalized, more situational and less uniform, and more voluntary and less compulsory. Notable exceptions to this trend, however, can be found in early history's ancient empire-states. This class examines the wide variation of pre-modern political forms and practices. It identifies the common dynamics of war, wealth, religion, which drove the political transformation of human society from pre-modern kinship communities to early modern proto-states. Comparative case studies are used to illustrate these processes. The cases are drawn mainly from the peoples of Eurasia and the Americas, where occurred the historic clashes between early modern territorial-based states and pre-modern stateless societies that have since shaped today's world.