Core and Recommended Readings for the Comprehensive Exam
Introduction
This is the list of Core and Recommended Readings for the comprehensive examinamtion for doctoral students in the International Graduate Program in Politics. Core readings are underlined. When students sit for the doctoral exam, they will face a total of eight questions in two categories: Core questions and Topical questions, four each. The Core questions are the same for everyone, so that all students sitting for the examination on the same day will face the same four questions drawn from the Core readings. From these, students must choose and answer two. Four more questions on specific topics, different for each student, will be asked in the Topical category. These questions are different for everyone, reflecting each given student’s research interests. Of these questions students also choose and answer only two each. As the questions in the “Topical” category are different for everyone, the reading list for this part of the test will vary accordingly by the student and must be proposed by each individual student with the approval of that student’s advisor. The Topical Readings list must then be approved by the IGPP Academic Review Committee (ARC) during the review of the student’s Course of Study application.
The Core Readings list is made up of 120 volumes, including multi-volume sets, essays and monographs. The student’s topical list must go at least to an additional 30 texts: 5 titles from the list below and 25 more books not listed chosen with the help of the advisor.
Comprehensive Examination
Doctoral students are required to pass a comprehensive examination in the third semester of their studies in this program. The exact timing of the test is determined by the program’s administrators. The examination has two parts that must be completed in a single 4-hour session. The first part is based on a core reading list taken from both sections of the Comprehensive Examination Reading List: these are the books and articles which are underlined. These core readings are required of all students. The second part of the examination is based on a specially chosen reading list according with each individual student’s research interests. The contents of this second list are determined in consultation with the student’s advisor and stand under condition of approval by the IGPP’s Academic Review Committee.
Each part of the doctoral examination consists of four questions from which a student chooses and answers only two. The questions are asked in English and the answers must be written in English in order to be considered for review. Each question is worth 25 points for a total possible score of 100. The examination is graded by the IGPP Grading Committee made up of at least three faculty members appointed by the IGPP’s Academic Review Committee. The Grading Committee meets when necessary, on a per-need basis. At least three members of the Grading Committee must grade all four answers for any given student’s examination. The aggregate of the grades for each answer will be calculated from between the scores given by each of the Grading Committee’s members. The final score is the total of the four aggregates.
The following grading scale is used: 73 or less = fail; 74 to 83 = low pass; 84 to 93 = pass; 94 to 100 = high pass. The Academic Review Committee will inform students of their scores. A student who has earned a failing grade has the right to take a new examination in the next six months. A second failing grade earns dismissal from from the program.
Politics Generally
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia; Hegel: Three Studies
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; The State of Exception
Althusser, Louis. For Marx; “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities
Aristotle, Politics,Nicomachean Ethics
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future; The Origins of Totalitarianism; Eichmann in Jerusalem
Augustine, City of God
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies
Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism;Simulacra and Simulation; The Illusion of the End
Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History;” “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Brady, Anne-Marie. The Emerging Politics of Antarctica
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism (2 volumes)
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History; The Practice of Everyday Life
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments
Chavez, Karma R. Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities
Dahl, Robert A. A Preface to Democratic Theory
Davis, Walter A. Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus;A Thousand Plateaus
Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law;” “Plato’s Pharmacy,” “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy
DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk
Durkheim, Émile. Suicide
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family; Private Property and the State
Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth; Black Skin, White Masks
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison;The History of Sexuality, Vols. 1-3; The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences; Society Must be Defended; Hermeneutics of the Subject; The Government of Self and Others; The Birth of Biopolitics; “What is Enlightenment?;” “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History;” “What Is an Author?”
Fraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices
Frazier, Franklin E. Black Bourgeoisie
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks
Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society
Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, James Madison. The Federalist Papers
Hardt, Michael, Antonio Negri. Empire, Multitude
Harvey, David.The New Imperialism;The Condition of Postmodernity; Spaces of Hope
Hayek, F.A. The Road to Serfdom
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit; The Lesser Logic; The Philosophy of Right
Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology;” Contributions to Philosophy, Being and Time
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan
Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition
Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One
James, William. Pragmatism
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism;The Political Unconscious
Kant, Immanuel. Political Writings (Cambridge Edition)
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling, Two Ages
King, Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Lacan, Jacques, Écrits
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life; The Production of Space; Dialectical Materialism
Lenin, Vladimir. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism;State and Revolution
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind; Tristes Tropiques
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority; Proper Names
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Two Treatises of Government.
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince; The Discourses
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue
Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia
Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach;Communist Manifesto; On the Jewish Question; The German Ideology; The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; The Grundrisse;Capital I; The 18th Brumaire
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Humanism and Terror, Adventures of the Dialectic
Mill, John Stuart.On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government,Utilitarianism
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
Moore, Barrington, Jr. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Russian Revolution; Leninism or Marxism
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo,Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense; Rights of Man
Penney, James. After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the 21st Century
Pippin, Robert B. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem
Plato, Apology;Crito;Phaedrus;Symposium;Republic;The Seventh Letter
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation
Pre-Socratic fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides
Rancière, Jacques. Disagreements
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice; Political Liberalism.
Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation; Memory, History, Forgetting
Rousseau. The Discourses and Other Writings,On the Social Contract
Said, Edward. Orientalism
Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness; Search for a Method
Saussure, Ferdinand. General Course in Linguistics
Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
Scott, James. Seeing Like a State
Sen, Amartya. “Democracy as a Universal Value”
Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Stiglitz, Joseph E. WhitherSocialism; Globalization and Its Discontents
Strauss, Leo. “Persecution and the Art of Writing”
Taylor, Charles, ed. Multiculturalism
Taussig, Michael. My Cocaine Museum; The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in Latin America; Law in a Lawless Land; The Magic of the State
Thoreau, Henry David. Civil Disobedience
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America.
Volonsinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, Volumes I-IV
Warner, Michael. Fear Of A Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
William, Raymond. Keywords
Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference;Inclusion and Democracy
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject; The Desert of the Real; Living in the End Times
Chinese Politics
Adler, Joseph. Chinese Religions
Andreas, Joel. Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class
Bell, Daniel A. China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society
Bianco, Lucien. Origins of the Chinese Revolution: 1915-1949
Bo Zhiyue. China’s Elite Politics: Governance and Democratization
Brady, Anne-Marie. Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China;Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic
Bramall, Chris. Chinese Economic Development
Brown, Kerry. Ballot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State
Carlson, Allen, Mary E. Gallagher, et al, eds. Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies
Chan, A., Madsen, R. and Unger, J. Chen Village under Mao and Deng
Chang Hui-Ching, Richard Holt. Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan: Naming China
Chang, Leslie T. Factory Girls from Village to City in a Changing China
Chen Jian.Mao’s China and the Cold War
Chen, Xiaoming. From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution: Guo Moruo and the Chinese Path to Communism
Cheng Chung-ying. New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy
Chow Tse-Tsung,The May 4th Movement: Intellectual Revolution In Modern China
Chun, Lin. The Transformation of Chinese Socialism
Confucius. Analects,The Book of Rites
Cook, Francis H. Hua-yen Buddhism
Dardess, John W. Governing China: 150-1850
Deng Xiaoping. Selected Works, Vols. 1-3
Dickson, Bruce J. Wealth into Power:The Communist Party's Embrace of China's Private Sector;Red Capitalists in China: The Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change
Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China
Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography
Fei Xiaotong.From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society
Fell, Dafydd. Party Politics in Taiwan: Party Change and the Democratic Evolution of Taiwan, 1991-2004
Fewsmith, Joseph. China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition
Frank, Andre Gunder. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
Fravel, M. Taylor. Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China's Territorial Disputes.
Gaetano, Arianne, Tamara Jacka. On The Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China
Gao Mobo. The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution
Gilmartin, Christina K., Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, Tyrene White. Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State
Gladney, Dru C. Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects
Greenhalgh, Susan. Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China
Hall, David L. and Roger T. Ames. Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture
Hansen, Valerie. The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600
Henriot, Christian. Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai- A Social History 1849-1949
Hinsch, Bret. Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China
Huang, Hans. Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan
Huang, Siu-chi. Essentials of Neo-Confucianism
Huang Yasheng. Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State
Jiang Zemin. Selected Works, Vols. 1-3
Johnson, Kay Ann. Woman, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China
Joseph, William A. Politics in China: An Introduction, 2nd Ed.
Kam, Lucetta. Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China
Kang Wenqing. Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900-1950
Knight, Nick. Rethinking Mao; Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in China
Landry, Pierre F. Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party’s Control of Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era
Laozi. Daodejing
Levenson, Joseph R. Confucian China and Its Modern Fate
Litzinger, Ralph A. Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging
Lu Xun.Selected Works, Vol. 1
Lüthi, Lorenz M. The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World
MacFarquhar, Roderick. The Politics of China: Sixty Years of the People’s Republic of China
Mao Zedong. Selected Works, Vols. 1-5
Marks, Robert B. China: Its Environment and History
McMahon, Keith. Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity
Mengzi, with Selections from the Traditional Commentaries
Meisner, Maurice, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism
Mozi
Mungello, D.E. The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800;Western Queers in China: Flight to the Land of Oz
Naughton, Barry. The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth
Needham, Joseph. The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West
Norman, Jerry. Chinese
Ong, Aihwa, and Li Zhang, eds. Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar
Peerenboom, Randall. China's Long March Toward Rule of Law;Judicial Independence in China: Lessons for Global Rule of Law Promotion
Pei Minxin. China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy
Short, Philip. Mao: A Life
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy
Saich, Tony. Government and Politics of China, 3rd Ed.
Schein, Louisa. Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics
Schram, Stuart. Mao Tse-tung
Schurmann, Franz. Ideology and Organization in Communist China
Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919
Shi Tianjian. The Cultural Logic of Politics in Mainland China and Taiwan
Scobell, Anderew. China’s Use of Military Force
Shambaugh, David. China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation;China Goes Global: The Partial Power; Tangled Titans: The United States and China
Shapiro, Judith. Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China.
Shirk, Susan L. China: Fragile Superpower
Snow, Edgar. Red Star Over China
Song, Ligang and Wing Thye Woo, eds. China’s Dilemma: Economic Growth, the Environment and Climate Change
Spence, Jonathan. The Search for Modern China
Thaxton, Ralph A., Jr. Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China
Tian Chenshan. Chinese Dialectics: From Yijing to Marxism
Vogel, Ezra F. Deng Xiaoping
Vukovich, Daniel F. China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC
Wan Guanghua. Inequality and Growth in Modern China
Wang Hui. The End of the Revolution
Wilkinson, Endymion. Chinese History: A New Manual
Wu Guanjuan. The Great Dragon Fantasy
Xiao, Lily, Hong Lee and Sue Wiles, Women of the Long March
Yeh, Wen-Hsi. Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond
Yijing/I-Ching.
Yu, Anthony. State and Religion in China: Historical and Textual Perspectives
Yu Keping. Democracy is a Good Thing
Zhang Dainian, Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy
Zheng, Tiantian. Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China
Zhuangzi
*Students are encouraged to follow the online resource, the China Leadership Monitor