History of Political Thought (original) (raw)
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Modern Political Thought Syllabus 2020
Course Content This course examines the development of theoretical inquiry into politics through the works of major political thinkers and philosophers throughout the modern period. By focusing on the classical texts of prominent intellectual figures, it grapples with the perennial issues of political theory such as the origin of political community, political authority, obligation, justice, legitimacy, freedom, and equality. Course Requirements The final grade will be based on the following components: 40% midterm exam 40% final exam 20% class participation, including attendance and contribution to discussion.
This course gives students a chronologically-based overview of the development of Western political philosophy. The first half of the course covers ancient thinkers from Greece and Rome and the various philosophical schools associated with them. The second half discusses philosophy from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. In order to make students aware of the breadth of philosophy, the course also engages with Islamic philosophy and examines its role in the West, as well as the work of female philosophers.
Syllabus - Modern Political Thought
Course Description The political theory canon is often divided into three eras, each separated by deep ideological and political crises. The Modern period, which we will be studying this semester, stretches from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, and sets itself off from what came before in that the Aristotelian Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, among other things, could no longer withstand the scientific, political, and economic changes sweeping through Europe. The moderns were, in this context, striving to build political institutions and construct worldviews that corresponded to their own times. The contemporary period, beginning roughly at the turn of the twentieth century, also experienced an array of ideological and political crises that likewise cannot be explained or resolved by the theoretical apparatuses of the modern period. We, too, only a century into this new era, are grappling with how best to construct our world. Over the course of the semester, we will gain a working knowledge of modern political theory and its debates by interrogating the ways in which theorists attempted to grapple with a series of crises, both ideological and political. In doing so, we will ask how past theories failed to address the severity or novelty of these crises, as well as how these crises prompted innovative ways of imagining a new future, one unencumbered by the past.
Recent tendencies in the history of political thought
History of European Ideas, 2011
The University of Cambridge has long been a centre for the teaching of the history of political thought. 1 In 1873, to meet concerns that the study of history alone might ''exercise too exclusively the memory and receptive imagination of the student'' (at the expense of the higher faculties of abstraction and generalisation), the new Historical Tripos included a number of ''theoretical'' courses taken over from the longer-established degree in Moral Sciences. 2 Among these was a paper in ''Principles of Political Philosophy and General Jurisprudence'', for which undergraduates read a fairly miscellaneous selection of ten books, from Aristotle's Politics to Maine's Ancient Law via François Guizot, John Stuart Mill, and John Austin. 3 True to the purpose of the paper, these books were read for direct political and philosophical illumination rather than as episodes in intellectual history. 4 It was indeed the view of a series of Cambridge historians in the later nineteenth century-most notably Sir John Seeley and Oscar Browning-that the study of history was properly understood as a foundation for a political science, and that (in Browning's words) ''the Tripos ought to some extent.. .be regarded as a Political Tripos.'' 5 In this conception, Browning was fighting a losing battle even at the end of the nineteenth century, and today the question of how to supplement the learning of history so as to borrow a degree of intellectual rigour from elsewhere has long lost its point. 6 (Nobody now doubts that history is a proper university subject, and accusations of objectionable novelty and intellectual flimsiness have found new targets.) It was a sign of the times when in 1929 ''Political Science A''-essentially a course in the comparative study of political institutions-was replaced by a paper on ''The History of Political Thought''. 7 Political philosophy, originally included in the Tripos as an intellectually bracing addition to mere historical erudition, was now to be treated as itself part of the history to be studied. 8 This approach informed pioneering work by J.G.A. Pocock and Peter Laslett in the 1950s, and theoretical manifestos by Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner in the following decade. 9 Since then, Cambridge has been associated with a distinctive way of studying the history of political thought, in which surviving texts are assigned to past contexts of political circumstance and intellectual practice in order to make possible the recovery of those texts' character as specific ''speech acts'' performed by historical agents. 10 It is an irony that this ''genuinely historical'' view of the history of political thought (to use Quentin Skinner's expression) has its origins in the inclusion of consciously nonhistorical subjects in the Cambridge Historical Tripos. 11 Between undergraduate education and the production of original historical research lies the training of graduate students, and at the graduate level the ''Cambridge School'' has had a pedagogical as well as a scholarly dimension from the outset. 12 It is a sign of the continuing vitality of graduate work in the history of political thought in Cambridge that since 2008 graduate students History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 396-402
Edited Book, 2018
This is a very brief introduction to the foundational subjects, concepts and discussion in political philosophy
New Histories of Political Thought for Old?
Political Studies, 1983
Over the last few years a number of books have appeared professing to have been inspired in their methodological considerations by the writings of Quentin Skinner.1 The purpose of this essay is to offer some deliberations upon two important and connected questions. First, in what way are the new histories related to the history of histories of political thought? And, secondly, how far are we on the road to achieving a consensus on the appropriate methods for studying the history of political thought?2 Before these questions can be considered I am obliged to offer a characterization, which in the form given here is little more than a caricature, of the whole of the history of histories of political thought without entering into the detail. What I offer is an attempt to capture its unity without ignoring its diversity.