21/3 – Political Ideologies

The module will provide an introduction into the history, key theses and critiques of major 20th and 21st century political ideologies, i.e., liberalism, socialism, anarchism, conservatism, nationalism, and fascism. These terms are ubiquitous both in academic and non-academic language. In political science or sociology we talk about liberal policies and conservative values, in history we may talk about socialist or nationalist movements, in the newspaper we may read about the dangers of anarchism or the return of fascism. Yet the vast and heated popular discourse and widespread prejudice and misunderstanding around these concepts often leaves people with people, often including academics, with a confused and inaccurate sense of their meaning and history. This module will provide you with a theoretically and historically grounded foundation in political ideologies. We will walk through recent political history in order to recover what these ideologies are all about, and discover if these widely used categories are still relevant for understanding our political and social reality today.