1st Tutorial - Tom

Entry Room Tutorial Notes

We started out by discussing the different ways that ideas can be political – making use of the “What Makes ideas political?” audio. This was a way into thinking about the role of political ideas in the Cold War. As I’m afraid I said rather more times than was strictly necessary – in this Room, the Cold War offers us a way into thinking about political ideas. The room, therefore, is not strictly speaking about the Cold War – it’s about using the Cold War as a case study for thinking about political ideas.

This is what we then went on to do by discussing the range of political ideas present in the work of Stimson, Gaddis and Keylor. One of the broad conclusions of this was that - using the definition laid out in “What Makes Ideas Political?” - political ideas are a feature of all the three interpretations of the Cold War, not simply the one that emphasizes ideology. We picked out several examples of political ideas in each text.

We then went on to look at Fukuyama – focusing first on what Fukuyama takes the end of the cold war to mean for political ideas. Towards the end of the session we broadened the discussion to an assessment of whether Fukuyama is correct about his end of ideology claim.