Politics for the People: Monarchy!
Taught by Nick Reynolds
Nick is a PhD candidate studying political theory at CUNY, with a BA and an MA in European history and Holocaust & Genocide Studies (he’s lots of fun at parties). An incorrigible nerd and bookworm, he’s interested in just about everything.
The oldest embodiment of political power, from the sacred kings of Indo-European myth to William and Kate, monarchies have ruled the world from the beginning of history. Kings and queens personify our most primal concepts of authority, violence, and celebrity.
But how did monarchy evolve, and how did it come to be considered divine? What explains ancient evidence for the ritual murder of kings? How did medieval autocrats come to shroud themselves in divine right? And why did societies throughout the world turn against humanity’s most hallowed form of sovereignty in the modern age of democratic revolutions?
Monarchy! will explore these questions and the history of royal rule, from Oedipus to Elizabeth II, to get at the heart of monarchies ancient, medieval, and modern.
This class is the first installment in the series Politics For The People: A Guide to the -isms and -archies that Rule the World. Keep an eye out for the next class later this summer.
If men were angels, said James Madison, no governments would be necessary. But we are not angels, and from our remotest past government has been an inescapable fact of human life. Politics for the People is a crash course in the often terrible and always strange ways human beings have set out to rule themselves. This series of classes will explore monarchy, republicanism, socialism, oligarchy, anarchism, theocracy, and more as we attempt to understand human beings as political animals.
