“Punishment, Politics, and Culture” is a five-week school teacher summer seminar for sixteen participants on punishment and its place in American culture. Austin Sarat, a political scientist who teaches in the Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought Program at Amherst College, leads a summer seminar to investigate the nature of punishment and its relationship to responsibility and justice; what punishment reveals about those who punish; selected episodes in the history of punishment and capital punishment in America; and the limits of punishment. Meeting four times a week, participants read (in whole or in part) and discuss a wide range of works spanning ancient to modern eras such as the book of Job, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Kant’s Science of Right and Lectures on Ethics, Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” H. L. A. Hart’s Punishment and Responsibility, Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville’s On the Penitentiary System of the United States, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Henry David Thoreau’s “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Albert Camus’ “Reflections of the Guillotine,” Walter Berns’ For Capital Punishment, Martha Nussbaum’s “Equity and Mercy,” Elaine Scarry’s The Body In Pain, and additional works of social science, and important Supreme Court decisions; the group also views selected films relating to the subject matter. The program includes three guest lecturers: Thomas Dumm (political science, Amherst College), Richard Moran (sociology, Mount Holyoke College), and Martha Umphrey (law and culture, Amherst College).
