NOTE: This syllabus is intended to give you guidance in what may be covered during the semester. I reserve the right to modify, supplement, and make changes as the course needs arise.
Week 1: Introduction to the course and to political philosophy
Week 2: Plato, Apology of Socrates & Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
Week 3: Plato, Crito & Plato, Republic (selections)
Week 4: Plato, Republic (selections)
Week 5: Aristotle, Ethics (selections) & Politics (selections)
Week 6: Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Week 7: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (selections)
Week 8: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (selections)
Week 9: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse (selections)
Week 10: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women & Olympe de Gouges, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman
Week 11: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (selections)
Week 12: Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Week 13: W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America & Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (selections)
Week 14: TBD