GOVT-505 Fundamentals: Political Theory

Faculty:

Mara, Gerald

The purpose of this course is to provide first or second year graduate students with a strong grounding in the foundations of western political philosophy. We shall be not so much following the history of political thought as studying different formal and substantive views of the enterprise of political philosophy -- what it tries to achieve and how it works. We will address these issues primarily through reading and writing about some important texts: Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses on Livy, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Nietzsche’s Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and Plato’s Gorgias. [Political Theory]

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: None

Other academic years
There is information about this course number in other academic years:

• 2004-2005 Fall and Spring
• 2005-2006 Fall and Spring
• 2006-2007 Fall and Spring
• 2009-2010 Fall and Spring
• 2012-2013 Fall and Spring

More information
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