MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

This course is a survey of modern political theory (approximately the 16th-19th centuries), examining the revolutionary challenges to classical and medieval political philosophy posed by such writers as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, and Marx. Our work seeks to address themes and questions such as: what is modern about modern political theory? What is human nature? What is power and how is it deployed? What are the possibilities and limits of social contract theory? What are the nature and scope of rights, duties, freedom, and equality? What is the relation between the state and the individual? What are rights and do they authorize political resistance? What are the core modern political values and how do modern political theorists grapple with their implementation? Does modernity signify an age of progress in terms of knowledge about the world and freedom for human beings? Or do modern technological, political and social developments actually constitute a new kind of prison? How do modern political thinkers conceptualize or fail to conceptualize race and gender? In what ways can modern political thought animate thinking about contemporary politics?

Simultaneously, we seek to critically engage with these classic texts about politics, political subjects, and political life in two ways. First, we will question what “modern” or “modernity” means historically and theoretically; in doing so, we will interrogate practices and theories of exclusion and violence that seek to grant only some subjects and collectivities access to the presumed progress of “modernity.” Second, and in a related vein, we will analyze these texts for the discourses of race and gender they produce, both explicitly and tacitly. We pursue these objectives by examining contemporary readings of this time period and of the theorists upon whom we will focus.