What Are the Formal Learning Goals of the Politics Major?
Aristotle wrote that politics is both the most comprehensive and most ennobling of disciplines. It is the most comprehensive because it contemplates with the basic questions of power, conflict, and structure that underlie all human experience; it is the most ennobling because it points us toward the highest ends of human life, including equality, freedom and justice. In practice, politics is the art and the rough-and tumble of diverse persons attempting to live together in civil society. In a world characterized by uncertainty, scarcity, conflict and power relationships, politics enables us to make collective choices by debate and negotiation rather than brute force. As an academic discipline, politics is equally challenging and provocative. It demands that we grapple with fundamental questions: How are we to act as citizens? How do our public institutions, and those in other countries, actually function? What values inform, or should inform, public policies? What forces motivate or im
