The course traces the development of Western political thought over the centuries, exploring arguments about the state and the individual as deployed by the most prominent western political thinkers. The course aims to show how those arguments differ from one to the other, and the extent to which they are convincing. Learning to analyze these arguments critically should provide students with a wide range of philosophical tools with which to address modern political issues.

 

To this end, we start off with Plato (5th century BC) and his famous suggestion about ‘philosopher kings’, and move on to consider Aristotle’s “Politics” and early democratic arguments. From the Greeks we proceed to Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, and then to the moderns: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.