From Ancient to Modern Political Thought

Excerpt:

In this course, we will cover how ancient politics transformed via various revolutions into modern thought patterns.

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

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?’