ABSTRACT
What do the Beatles teach students of political science? I’m a political science professor at Union College (Schenectady, New York), where I teach a class on music and politics. The study of the Beatles constitutes an important component of this course. As messengers and bearers of an evolving repertoire of sounds and styles, actions and attitudes, and images and ideas, the Beatles represent a definable worldview that has important political implications. Their impact on the development of 1960s youth culture is immense and unanimously recognised by scholars and writers. In this chapter, I bring the Beatles into the debates over perennial political issues that are normally reserved for philosophers and intellectuals. The question addressed here is Machiavelli’s famous query in The Prince, ‘is it better to be loved than to be feared or the contrary?’ The Beatles and Machiavelli represent different answers to this question, and the key mission of this chapter is to contemplate and evaluate that difference in the context of an undergraduate political science class.
