3.0

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Many of the ideas which shape today´s world- democracy, liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, socialism, nationalism - have their roots in a "great conversation" (Robert Hutchins) that spans some 25 centuries from ancient Greece until today. The conversation motivating the Western tradition has included a set of perennial questions such as: Who ought to rule - and how do we decide? What is the purpose of politics? What is the best form of constitution? What makes political authority legitimate? What is political justice? What is citizenship? This course is intended as a broad survey of some the most influential political thinkers in the intellectual tradition of Europe and America. Among the many who will be examined are : Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Voltaire, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt.