The Politics of Modernity

Catalog description

This courses re-traces modern political thought through four concepts that characterize its emergence: nature, freedom, rights, and revolution. This course engages these concepts through texts across several genres, primarily those produced in the Italian city-states, Britain, France, and Germany. Beginning with Niccol?chiavelli, we will first consider what exactly participants in modernity understood themselves to be doing. Next, alongside the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we will explore how these ideas about modernity inflect their understanding of nature and ground their understandings of political freedom. Then, we will engage with these insights in tandem with conflicts over notions of the citizen as a rights-bearing figure in the years of the American and French Revolutions through the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and Edmund Burke. We will conclude by examining the legacy of revolution in modern political thinking in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. (GOVT-PT)