TTC - Ideas in Politics - Jeremy Shearmur

Shearmur is an intelligent, organized and modest presenter -- about as helpful as a prof can be. Here, his goal is to take politics and make the subject intellectually interesting; as the series' title suggests, this isn't a course about backroom dealmaking or quarreling politicians, it's a course about ideas. In the first half, Shearmur lays out the histories and philosophies of what (as I recall, anyway) he sees as the three main currents in Western political thinking: conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. In the second half of the course, he discusses the ways these tendencies manifest themselves in the present-day world -- as feminism, for instance, or multiculturalism. Big-picture/small-picture: it's a great way to get some perspective on what so many people seem to love arguing about, god only knows why.