Culture, politics and vision: aspects of European political thought
M Janover
8 points * 3 hours per week * First semester * Clayton
This subject examines the history of political thought from its inception in the ancient Greek philosophical questioning of the meaning and value of life in a polis (city-state), through to the seventeenth-century emergence of liberalism in the thinking of John Locke. It explores the ideas and the historical contexts of several ages and thinkers: Homeric Greece, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hellenism, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke. Through the course the cultural dimensions of political ideas will be emphasised by setting those ideas in the context of philosophical, artistic, religious and scientific views and activities. Questions of how historically distant combinations of culture and politics can best be understood will be raised and various methodological approaches to these questions, adopted by intellectual and cultural histories, will be surveyed.
Assessment
Written (3000 words): 50% * Examination (3 hours): 50%
Recommended texts
Gombrich E In search of cultural history Clarendon Press, 1969
Forsyth M and Keens-Soper M (eds) A guide to the political classics OUP, 1988
Strauss L and Cropsey J (eds) History of political philosophy 3rd edn, U Chicago P, 1987