Political Science 372, 2008

The Western Political Tradition: Machiavelli to Marx and Mill

(a.k.a. [by the registrar, among others] “Hobbes to Mill”)

G. Schochet

Monday and Wednesday, 3:55-5:15

(Douglass Campus)

This course, the chronological sequel to Political Science 371, deals with western political thought and philosophy from the late Renaissance and Reformation (ca. 1500) to the end of the nineteenth century. More specifically, it is concerned with the sources and early developments of the doctrines, vocabularies, and practices that comprise the dominant political ideologies of the twenty-first century and, as much as possible, with the historical circumstances - social and political institutions, religious beliefs and practices, and societal cleavages and conflicts - from which those doctrines were derived.

The period witnessed momentous changes in politics, religion, philosophy, science, technology, and commerce. Protestant Christianity and the territorial state completed the theological and political breakup of Roman Catholic Christendom and its Holy Roman Empire counterpart. Humanism, empiricism, Copernican and Newtonian science, and philosophic scepticism replaced traditional theocratic and metaphysical explanations of the world. An unprecedentedly rapid and far-reaching technological revolution - the introduction of movable type (1455?) to the mechanization of production, transportation, and communication - accompanied and fostered by radical changes in economics, trade, and imperial expansion, forces that ultimately transformed the rural agrarianism of traditional western Europe into urban industrialism.

From the perspective of political theory, the most important and continuing consequences of all these changes were the emergence of new forms of social and political association and control. Democratic-constitutionalism, so-called liberalism, Marxian (and other varieties of) socialism, radical individualism, communitarianism, feminism, romantic authoritarianism, republicanism, and the politics of religious toleration and liberty as well as of evangelicalism and religious fundamentalism - to say nothing of racism, sexism, religious prejudice, and nationalism-all find their roots in and experience their initial flowerings during what are known to historians as the "early modern" and "modern"periods (roughly, 1500-1900) as political theorists reflected upon - to criticize as well as to justify - their changing worlds and the new roles for political leaders and members that were emerging.

All readings will be in original sources (with occasional commentaries and secondary materials suggested).

Assigned works, available at the Douglass Coop bookstore. Students are urged to used the assigned texts.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge University Press)
Martin Luther and John Calvin, On Secular Authority, ed. Harro Höpfl (Cambridge University Press)
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge University Press)
John Locke, Second Treatise in Two Treatises, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press)

John Locke, Letter concerning Toleration, ed. James Tully (Hackett)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. and trans., Maurice Cranston (Hackett)
David Hume, selections from Political Writings, ed. Stuart D. Warner (Hackett)

and from A Treatise of Human Nature (to be announced)

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, selections from The Federalist, ed. J.R. Pole (Hackett)

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Hackett)

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ed. Miriam Brody (Penguin)
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Edward Alexander (Broadview)

John Stuart Mill, On the Subjection of Women (Broadview)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, selections from The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (Norton)

There will be a mid-term and a take-home final examination.