MLA Seminar: Political Philosophy and the Social Contract

This is a critical survey of the history of western modern political philosophy, beginning with the Ancient Greeks and concluding with the 21st Century. Our study begins with Socrates and Plato and ends with Rawls and his critics. The organizing theme of our investigation will be the idea of the Social Contract. We will examine different contract theories as well as criticisms and proposed alternatives to the contract idea. Besides the above, examples of authors we will read are Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Arendt, and Mill.