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The history of Euro-American Political Thought has been criticized for its orientations to race, gender, class, Christianity, the subject, capitalism, colonialism, sociocentrism, and humanist exceptionalism. How deeply are those themes ensconced in early Christian traditions, secular orientations to the earth, practices of capitalism, and contemporary images of “the political”? What openings are discernible? The seminar starts with Hesiod’s Theogony and a chapter from Tim Whitmarsh on atheism in ancient Greece. It then explores how Augustine consolidates sharp shifts in orientations to faith, divinity, nature, discipline, time and the earth. An agent of the first conquest of paganism. Readings in The City of God: Against the Pagans and The Confessions in relation to Foucault’s newly translated book, Confessions of The Flesh. Then we turn to what might be called the second Christian/imperial conquest of paganism, launched during the 15th century Spanish invasion of the Americas. How did that conquest re-enact and differ from the first? Texts by Todorov, The Conquest of America, alongside essays by C.L.R. James and perhaps de Castro. Followed by essays from Kant, Marx, Arendt, or Deleuze/Guattari, to see how each consolidates or turns earlier western theories. The seminar then engages Dipesh Chakrabarty in The climate of history in a planetary age as he criticizes Euro-centered thought (“the political”, the earth as background to politics, racism, exceptionalism, etc) and some currents in post-colonial thought. Critiques and augmentations will be explored, too.