Projecting human virtues onto the behavior of the beehive and extracting normative politics from apian interactions goes back to ancient times. The honeybee has long embodied the lawfulness of non-human Nature while also serving an indispensable role in our political economy. As budding social scientists, cultural critics, and humanists, CPS students will examine bee-related texts as convenient proxies for the larger historical problem of how we have looked to Nature when identifying the regularities of the human-built world. This is not a survey course ("Plato to NATO"), though it does range across a broad swathe of history. It is an introductory course, however, in the sense that students with no prior training in history will have the opportunity to sample each week from a diverse corpus of texts and learn how to subject them to historical analysis.
- Instructor: Karl Hall