Introduction What is Politics?
Part I: From Ancient to Modern Politics
How did the ancients think about politics?
Polybius On the Forms of States.
Ancient Republicanism becomes modern
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
vs
Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince.
Commonwealth as Artifice and the birth of liberalism
Thomas Aquinas vs
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, selections
Part II: Revolution
French Revolution and the Enlightenment
J.J. Rousseau, The Social Contract
Immanuel Kant What is Enlightenment?
The American Revolution
Liberal freedom in the American context
Thomas Paine, Common Sense(1776)
Republican Freedom in the American context
How much governance can a Republic tolerate, and still be a Republic?
Federalist Papers No.9, 14, 47-51vs. Letters of Brutus, No. I, II, and IV
The practices of democracy and its dangers: the freedom to associate and the tyranny of the majority
Tocqueville Democracy in America, chs. XII & ch. XV.
Revolution then, what now? The Modern Revolutions freed the people,or did they?
Hannah Arendt ‘What is Freedom?,’ from Between Past and Future
Part III. Modern Domination and Resistance
Racial and Class Domination
Slavery
Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass written by himself
Capitalism as bondage: or Law, freedom and economic life
Karl Marx Manifesto of the Communist Party
Is our desire to be happy making us unfree? Can we be free and happy? What is the relationship between freedom and happiness?
Fyodor Dostoyevski The Grand Inquisitor
The impatience for liberty in modernity
Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’