Modern Political Thought 1 POLS 2328 Modern Political Thought Spring 2018 Prof. Natalie Bormann [email protected] 932 Renaissance Park Office Hours: M 3-4, T 3-4, W 10-11 Paper 1 | A critical appraisal of the state Instructions In “Why Hitler’s world may not be so far away”, Timothy Snyder thinks about what leads people to become mass killers; he points to the pivotal role of the state in this and argues, ‘the state stood in the middle of the story of those who wished to kill the Jews, and of those who wished to save them’. Taking cues from this statement in particular, and the article as a whole, discuss the following points: 1) Explain how Snyder’s view of the role of the state in the context of genocide connects with Hobbes and Kropotkin. Apply the concepts of human nature and the state of nature to the theme of the article, and as understood by Hobbes and Kropotkin. 2) Evaluate to what extent the state may be complicit in the possibility of acts of genocide. 3) Recommend how we ought to relate to arguments of the legitimacy and necessity of the state today. Reading 1) Timothy Snyder on “Why Hitler’s world may not be so far away”. You can listen to the article as an interview with Timothy Snyder here, read the text online here and find a copy in this document here. 2) Hobbes’ Leviathan 3) Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid Due Friday February 2 https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2015/sep/24/podcast-audio-longread-hitler-ethics-history https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/hitlers-world-may-not-be-so-far-away Modern Political Thought 2 Some paper writing guidelines Format § Papers should be around 1000 words long (-/+ 10% only! I will take half a grade off for longer papers) § Papers do not need to have a particular font, font size, or margin. § Papers need to be submitted through Turnitin on Blackboard. Please do not email me your paper. Deadline § Papers can be submitted until the end of the day they are due (which means midnight). § There is a ‘grace period’ of 2 days within which you may submit (here: Sunday, February 4). § If you feel you cannot meet the deadline after the grace period has lapsed, you must meet with me to discuss your ideas on the paper and to work on a schedule for submission. Not consulting me on late submissions results in point deductions. Questions about the paper § Extra office hours for this paper are as follows: o Monday, Jan 29, 10-11am | Wednesday, Jan 31, 3-4pm | Thursday, Feb 1, 3-4pm. § The discussion groups are set up to address any questions about the paper you may have. § I also answer paper questions via email and am committed to reading paper outlines. Sources § Papers should have traces of the original texts we read. Please make sure to include page references and your source. You can decide on the citation style as long as you stay consistent with that style throughout the paper. § You are invited to use additional resources (other texts, articles, books) ...

1. Modern Political Thought 1
POLS 2328
Modern Political Thought
Spring 2018
Prof. Natalie Bormann
[email protected]
932 Renaissance Park
Office Hours: M 3-4, T 3-4, W 10-11
Paper 1 | A critical appraisal of the state
Instructions
In “Why Hitler’s world may not be so far away”, Timothy
Snyder thinks about what leads people to become mass
killers; he points to the pivotal role of the state in this and
argues, ‘the state stood in the middle of the story of those
who wished to kill the Jews, and of those who wished to save
them’. Taking cues from this statement in particular, and
the article as a whole, discuss the following points:
1) Explain how Snyder’s view of the role of the state in the
context of genocide connects with Hobbes
and Kropotkin. Apply the concepts of human nature and the
state of nature to the theme of the article,
and as understood by Hobbes and Kropotkin.
2) Evaluate to what extent the state may be complicit in the
possibility of acts of genocide.
3) Recommend how we ought to relate to arguments of the
legitimacy and necessity of the state today.

2. Reading
1) Timothy Snyder on “Why Hitler’s world may not be so far
away”. You can listen to the article as an
interview with Timothy Snyder here, read the text online here
and find a copy in this document here.
2) Hobbes’ Leviathan
3) Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid
Due Friday February 2
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2015/sep/24/podcast-
audio-longread-hitler-ethics-history
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/hitlers-world-
may-not-be-so-far-away
Modern Political Thought 2
Some paper writing guidelines
Format
§ Papers should be around 1000 words long (-/+ 10% only! I
will take half a grade off for longer papers)
§ Papers do not need to have a particular font, font size, or
margin.
§ Papers need to be submitted through Turnitin on Blackboard.
Please do not email me your paper.
Deadline
§ Papers can be submitted until the end of the day they are due
(which means midnight).
§ There is a ‘grace period’ of 2 days within which you may
submit (here: Sunday, February 4).
§ If you feel you cannot meet the deadline after the grace period

3. has lapsed, you must meet with me to
discuss your ideas on the paper and to work on a schedule for
submission. Not consulting me on late
submissions results in point deductions.
Questions about the paper
§ Extra office hours for this paper are as follows:
o Monday, Jan 29, 10-11am | Wednesday, Jan 31, 3-4pm |
Thursday, Feb 1, 3-4pm.
§ The discussion groups are set up to address any questions
about the paper you may have.
§ I also answer paper questions via email and am committed to
reading paper outlines.
Sources
§ Papers should have traces of the original texts we read. Please
make sure to include page references and
your source. You can decide on the citation style as long as you
stay consistent with that style throughout
the paper.
§ You are invited to use additional resources (other texts,
articles, books) but you are not expected to doing
so.
About the paper
§ Papers are neither book reviews nor summaries. The section
on my course philosophy signal that the
objective of our engagement with the material is to evaluate and
critically assess our relationship with key
political concepts and ideas. Therefore, papers should be
interpretative in nature, and you are asked to

4. explain concepts, analyze their role and importance, and
recommend how we may need to understand,
question, accept, or deny these concepts.
§ Stay away from lengthy descriptions and include only material
that you are willing to discuss in detail.
§ Papers should have an opening paragraph that sets out the
overall objective and development of the
paper. Be clear about what the overall ‘take away’ will be in
the paper.
§ Paper guidelines do not need to be answered in order or in
designated sections. You should attempt to
write a coherent narrative that addresses the questions
throughout. Treat the questions as prompts and
cues.
§ Papers may use a first-person narrative. Eg. ‘I agree with
Hobbes’
§ Papers are at their best when they show reflection and
analysis.
§ I encourage you to base the papers on the discussions we have
during our class time.
Hitler’s world may not be so far away
Misunderstanding the Holocaust has made us too certain we are
ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1940s. Faced with a
new catastrophe – such as devastating climate change – could
we
become mass killers again?

5. Timothy Snyder
Wednesday 16 September 2015 01.00 EDT
It was 20 years after I chose to become a historian that I first
saw a photograph of the woman who made my career possible.
In the small photograph that my doctoral supervisor, her son,
showed
me in his Warsaw apartment, Wanda J radiates self-possession,
a quality that stood her in good stead during the Nazi
occupation. She was a Jewish mother who protected herself and
her two sons
from the German campaign of mass murder that killed almost all
of her fellow Warsaw Jews. When her family was summoned to
the ghetto, she refused to go. She moved her children from
place to
place, relying upon the help of friends, acquaintances and
strangers. When first the ghetto and then the rest of the city of
Warsaw were burned to the ground, what counted, she thought,
was the
“faultless moral instinct” of the people who chose to help Jews.
Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral
instinct”. Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in
some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local
institutions corrupted
and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us
would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are
ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or
for that
matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so
successfully promulgated and realised. A historian must be
grateful to Wanda J for her courage and for the trace of herself
that she left
behind. But a historian must also consider why rescuers were so
few. It is all too easy to fantasise that we, too, would have aided
Wanda J. Separated from National Socialism by time and luck,

6. we
can dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they
functioned. It is our very forgetfulness of the circumstances of
the Holocaust that convinces us that we are different from Nazis
and shrouds
the ways that we are the same. We share Hitler’s planet and
some of his preoccupations; we have perhaps changed less than
we think.
The Holocaust began with the idea that no human instinct was
moral. Hitler described humans as members of races doomed to
eternal and bloody struggle among themselves for finite
resources.
Hitler denied that any idea, be it religious, philosophical or
political, justified seeing the other (or loving the other) as
oneself. He claimed that conventional forms of ethics were
Jewish inventions,
and that conventional states would collapse during the racial
struggle. Hitler specifically, and quite wrongly, denied that
agricultural technology could alter the relationship between
people and
nourishment.
Hitler’s alternative to science and politics was known as
Lebensraum, which meant “habitat” or “ecological niche”.
Races needed ever more Lebensraum, “room to live”, in order to
feed themselves
and propagate their kind. Nature demanded that the higher races
overmaster and starve the lower. Since the innate desire of each
race was to reproduce and conquer, the struggle was indefinite
and eternal. At the same time, Lebensraum also meant “living
room”, with the connotations of comfort and plenty in family
life. The desire for pleasure and security could never be
satisfied,
thought Hitler, since Germans “take the circumstances of the
American life as the benchmark”. Because standards of living

7. were always subjective and relative, the demand for pleasure
was
insatiable. Lebensraum thus brought together two claims: that
human beings were mindless animals who always needed more,
and jealous tribes who always wanted more. It confused
lifestyle
with life itself, generating survivalist emotions in the name of
personal comfort.
Hitler was not simply a nationalist or an authoritarian. For him,
German politics were only a means to an end of restoring the
state of nature. “One must not be diverted from the borders of
Eternal
Right,” as Hitler put it, “by the existence of political borders.”
Likewise, to characterise Hitler as an antisemite or an anti-
Slavic racist underestimates the potential of Nazi ideas. His
ideas about Jews
and Slavs were not prejudices that happened to be extreme, but
rather emanations of a coherent worldview that contained the
potential to change the world. By presenting Jews as an
ecological
flaw responsible for the disharmony of the planet, Hitler
channelled and personalised the inevitable tensions of
globalisation. The only sound ecology was to eliminate a
political enemy; the only
sound politics was to purify the earth; the means to these ends
would be the destruction of states.
* * *
The state stood at the middle of the story of those who wished
to kill Jews, and of those who wished to save them. Its mutation
within Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, and then its
destruction
in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1938 and 1939,
transformed Jews from citizens into objects of exploitation. The
Final

8. Solution
as mass murder began in a zone of double state destruction.
Hitler finally got the European war that he wanted by treating
his ultimate enemy as his temporary friend. In September 1939,
the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east just after
Germany
attacked from the west. The German-Soviet Treaty of Borders
and Friendship arranged a final division of Poland and endorsed
the Soviet occupation and destruction of the three Baltic states.
The
USSR then proceeded very quickly to deport or murder the
social and political elites in its new western territories. When
Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union in
June 1941,
German soldiers and then special SS-led task forces known as
Einsatzgruppen first encountered populations that had been
subject to the Soviet version of state destruction.
Over 700,000 prisoners were killed at the Nazi extermination
camp at Treblinka, Poland. Photograph: Ira Nowinski/Corbis

9. It was this double assault upon state institutions in the Baltic
states and eastern Poland, at first by the Soviet Union and then
by Nazi Germany, that created the special field of
experimentation
where ideas of a Final