APPROACHES AND ISSUES IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (original) (raw)

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to a variety of approaches and issues in political philosophy. Half of the class will be devoted to reading and commenting on primary texts such as: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The other half focuses on the secondary literature. After examining in detail each of these classic texts, we shall explore various ways in which they have been interpreted by several main schools: contextualist (Quentin Skinner and his disciples), post-modern (Sheldon Wolin and his disciples), Straussian (Leo Strauss and his disciples), feminist (Susan M. Okin, etc.), and intellectual history (Isaiah Berlin etc.), and conceptual history (Koselleck). On a general level, this course has several pedagogical aims. First, it seeks to provide an overview of a few canonical texts and authors. Second, the course seeks to help students develop the capacity to engage in advanced textual exegesis and to critically evaluate alternative approaches and interpretive methods.