Special Topics in Political Theory: Foundations of Political Philosophy

This course is a seminar on the history of political thought. Its focus is the social contract tradition and its critics, including criticisms or amendments of contract theory based on the alleged sociability of humankind. We will study canonical texts in this tradition, with a special interest in their implications for law.

Readings will include works by Aristotle, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Bentham, Kant, Mill, Marx, Rawls, and others.

Students will be expected to engage in close readings of these texts, participate in seminar discussion, and undertake a series of written reflections.

This course is a Foundations seminar in the PhD Program in Jurisprudence & Social Policy (JSP) and is open to all JSP, JD, LLM, and JSD students as well as graduate students from other campus departments.