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Despite seemingly universal approval today, a deep skepticism of democracy and “the demos” runs throughout the canon of Western thought. This course traces the distrust of democracy through canonical texts, including Plato’s Republic, The Federalist, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. While these thinkers stress democracy’s excess, others will highlight its insufficiency, as in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Malcolm X Speaks. Central to the course will be the effort to define what it is we mean when we talk about “democracy” and, in the process, to better understand why so many people throughout history have been afraid of it.