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Description: |
PSC 209 Power, Violence, and Virtue: Themes in Modern Political Thought: How can actors change their society--not just their institutions, but their whole "mode of being," their identities, the relations with one another, and their relations to the natural world? What moral or political criteria should we use to assess such change? Are the virtues and moral orientations that operate in most social contexts appropriate to political life, or are there unique considerations that must be taken into account when engaging in political action? In this class, we will explore these sorts of questions primarily by examining a group of thinkers who confronted radical social changes directly and developed a new vocabulary for understanding them. These are the early modern political theorists, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Wollstonecraft . In examining these thinkers, and in applying them to historical and contemporary moral-political dilemmas, students will learn how "political creativity" happens: how new societies get founded, how to think about the justices and injustices of modern life, and how to understand the possibilities or preserving or going beyond the achievements of modernity. Possible topics of dispute include the justice of war, the role of violence in political life, the emergence of new rights claims that appear to violate the existing order, and the question of what a political community can do to keep itself intact and what criteria we might use for evaluating these questions. |