Professor Dienstag is a very kind and intelligent individual who has a very old-school approach to lecture. His class is structured around his lecture time being spent speaking on the required texts, its context, as well as expanding upon the text and building it into something more approachable. Most of the lecture is spent being lectured to with random intercessions for questions from students. The most crucial element to his class is attending discussion having read the material and being prepared to discuss and dissect it. The class relied on three essays and weekly readings that made up the majority of your grade. The workload is reasonable with a heavy reliance on required (student purchased) texts on dense philosophy and theory. Attend lecture, attend discussion, engage, and write your essays well. Also take advantage of office hours and opportunities for questions to ensure you do understand the often dense material. The biggest emphasis is formulating your own interpretation of the readings and putting that into your papers while avoiding summarizing the text. Overall, Professor Dienstag is an extremely friendly, approachable, and knowledgeable professor with a desire to encourage and cultivate a deeper understanding of the material with an emphasis on learning.

This is by far one of the best, and most challenging classes I've taken at UCLA. Professor Dienstag will throw this incredibly complex material at you (anything ranging from Heidegger to Hegel) which leaves the reader... confused to say the least; then he will give a cohesive and compelling lecture that ties all of the texts together. It's definitely a sink or swim kind of class so I highly recommend taking notes with the reading to make sure you grasp the text or at least have something to say once essays roll around. I know note taking takes forever but it's really important to have anything to grab onto, given the abstract nature of the texts.
Discussions facilitated by the TA Steve Cucharo were always fantastic too, because he encouraged everyone to explore concepts that often felt out of reach. He genuinely cares about his students' learning experience, so whenever I was struggling he was always a good person to talk to.

During lecture the professor just writes topics down on the board and doesn't use slides at all. So unless you have perfect attention skills, the lectures don't really help. If you do, then the lectures will be extremely clear and easy to understand. The readings are challenging as in any political theory course and quite dense. For Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I strongly recommend relying on secondary sources such as the Routledge Guidebook to Phenomenology of Spirit and Logic of Desire. Trust me, Hegel has the potential to single-handedly ruin your GPA.

The bulk of the grade consists of three writing assignments in which you have the option of doing a prompt out of many. For all of the books you could just find PDFs online and print them out double sided on a 4-image layout for the open-book quizzes you'll have in class. I recommend reading the works even before the first day of class otherwise you'll be permanently playing a game of catchup.

By far, the best class I've taken at UCLA. Professor Dienstag is a superb lecturer and is truly passionate about the subject. I went in thinking it would be another boring theory class but this class ended up shaping me both personally and academically. I would definitely recommend it to anyone!