Government 212 - ORGANIZED LABOR/AMER DEMOCRACY

In this course we will focus on a central tension in American democracy: the conflict between the desire to limit factionalism, and the desire to allow individuals to assemble in order to use their massed political power to ensure equality. On the one hand, democracy must avoid the existence o factions large and powerful enough to tyrannize those outside the faction. On the other hand, it must allow individuals to form organizations in order to leverage greater amounts of political power, else the clash of differing interests would be likely to cause democracy to grind to a halt. We will examine this tension through the lens of the U.S. labor movement.(E)