Franklin & Marshall College

GOV 242 - Modern Political Theory

In this course, we will investigate classic works of political thought from what is often referred to as the “modern” era (1500 to the present).  We will begin with the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, who is universally agreed not to be modern, and then move forward through time to the works of Renaissance writer Niccolo Machiavelli, through the social contract theorists Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the American founders, and to their more recent critics Karl Marx and Michel Foucault.  Throughout this investigation, we will try to gain a clearer sense of what the distinctive features of “modern” political thought might be, and of why these features might have come to exist when they did.

During this investigation, we will often find that we must give special attention to three interrelated themes: liberty, law, and personal character.  As we will see, many of the authors in this class conceptualize the meaning of these terms very differently, and they often have very different understandings of the ways in which each relates (or doesn’t relate) to the other.  Because this is a course in political theory, we will investigate both the theorists’ descriptions of what the present political world is like and their prescriptions for what it should be like.  As we will see, one of the central debates within the class involves the question of just how much room for intentional human choice there may be within political life: are the distinctive features of the modern world created by our moral and other aspirations, or are those aspirations themselves created by features of the modern world?