Modern Political Thought

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

odernity, and what it means, has increasingly become a topic of dispute in the 20th and 21st centuries, with defenders and critics on both left and right. Yet our modern heritage continues to shape even the thought of its critics and lay the groundwork for many of our unquestioned assumptions about political, social, and moral life. This course traces the story of modern political thought from its origins in the wake of the Reformation and Renaissance to the crisis of modernity experienced at the close of the XIXth. We will survey the emergence of questions surrounding justice and the nature of the state in the early social contract theorists (Hobbes, Rousseau) before moving to discuss the increasing concern over balancing the claims of individuals, civil society, and the modern state (Kant, Hegel, Mill) that arise in the wake of the French Revolution. Finally, we will trace the emergence of liberal modernity's critics who have remained influential in even contemporary evaluations of the modern project (Marx, Nietzsche). Through the close study of both text and context, we will debate to what extent the project of liberal modernity still remains valid and whether its claims have been unsettled.