Exploration of questions about civil disobedience, legitimate authority, ethics and politics, and the challenge of creating a just order in a world characterized by multiple beliefs and identities. Discussion of anarchism, democracy, liberalism, decolonization, violence and revolution, universalism and cultural relativism, and differences of race, class and gender. Authors include Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Locke, Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Fanon, and Gandhi. Not open to students who have taken Pol4 245. Exploration of diverse understandings of the concepts of justice, freedom and equality.
Attention is paid to the historical context within which a political theory is written.
241 Modern Political Theory Stettner Study of the development of Western political theory from the 17th to 19th centuries. Among the theorists read are Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Mill, Hegel and Marx. Exploration of diverse understandings of the concepts of justice, freedom and equality. Attention is paid to the historical context within which a political theory is written. Attention will be paid to theoretically grounded approaches to political inquiry, including functionalism, structuralism, and post-modernist theory.