Great Political Thinkers

Catalog description

Political philosophy examines the fundamental problems faced by human beings both as individuals and as a members of associations that, in the Western tradition, have come to be called political. It asks two decisive questions: how should I live my life? and how should we live together? Together these questions point to central dilemmas of human life that the great thinkers of the Western tradition have explored with tremendous depth. What is justice? How does the good of the individual relate to the good of the political community? Is thought superior to action or is action superior to thought? What is virtue? Piety? Courage? The inquiry into these questions has profoundly shaped our lives as well as the countries we inhabit, including the United States. In this class, we will study seminal thinkers in the history of Jewish and Western political thought, including Plato, Aristotle, Abarbanel, Maimonides, and Machiavelli. Because the West was founded on a synthesis of biblical and Greek traditions, we shall also compare the seminal Greek philosophical texts with political texts from the Hebrew Bible, and ponder the impact that both worldviews had on the development of Western Civilization.