I was pretty intrigued by how I would like this course and how I would come to understand something like Political Science. It's a little different for me because I'm majoring in Mathematics and Economics, which are a lot more objective, I suppose. Generally, there's a right answer in those. Or, at least, there's decision-procedure-type mechanism that gives you the principles to dry and derive the right answer. The exception is some questions in economics, but I'll just say that Political Science is not very similar to more quantitative disciplines like math or economics.
Even though I do like Mathematics and such, I really enjoy reading - like, constantly. And it was really interesting to read the original texts of people like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and JS Mill. It allowed me to do a lot of things that I will continue to outline below.
I really enjoyed this class a lot. Part of the appeal for me was that there wasn't a clearly defined decision procedure, and very rarely a completely correct answer (like the sum of 2 and 2). This was awesome, it encouraged me to think about different contemporary problems through different scopes - whether it was Machiavelli's conception of a "Prince" or by assessing the "Justice" of an action according to Dr. King or by thinking about the complete liberty advocated by JS Mill. Needless to say a lot of the people that we read samples from and talked about would not have gotten along (Burke and Mill arguing each other, etc.)
But, most of all, I liked that this class advocated all different theories. And that none of them were right (I don't think). That's not to say I didn't support some or didn't dislike some others, but I did come to appreciate each argument and see that every theory has reasonable groundwork. This is evident by an example: communism (or marxism). They aren't the same thing! I came to realize that some parts of Marxism could actually be desirable, but then again they'd be hard to implement or are only good on the surface. Or something like Free Speech. Now I understand (better) the arguments that can be made against free speech, even though I do support free speech. I think it's important to know arguments and counterarguments and counter-counterarguments and on-and-on. This allows me to have stronger opinions and really explore my own opinions instead of only believing things on the surface, instead of really having a deeply held belief.
I appreciated this class because it allows me to do a lot of things that were talked about in the class in my everyday life, such as vote knowledgeably (somewhat!) in democratic elections.
And mostly it taught me to Sapere Aude.
Sources of pictures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccolò_Machiavelli
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill
