Week 8

I have cut down the readings some this week so we can focus in on the questions of the state and the rise of the system of states. In the readings below this is really a conversation about civil society in its relationship to internal sovereignty and whether a global civil society could constitute the basis of a global system or the end of international relations. Hegel and Kant are the intellectual tradition from which most Liberal IR theory emerges. The English school in particular finds its commitments to global order in the imaginary of Hegel. The Foucault reading provides alternative reading of the consolidation of power and the rise of civil society as a series crisis or problems rather than an organic unity with the state. The Hegel reading is not easy but put the time in as he best constructs how the matrix of civil society, state, and global state require one another for the possibility of something like international law. Enjoy and see you next week.

Hegel

Kant

Foucault