Political Science 212B: Renaissance and Early Modern Political Thought

This semester’s version of this course will focus on three broad approaches to politics: Absolutism, Republicanism, and Radicalism. We will focus on a handful of individual primary texts, however, rather than secondary literature or historiographical themes. Texts will include some of the following: Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince, Machiavelli’s Prince, and More’s Utopia; Hobbes’s Leviathan, Henry Parker’s Observations, and Leveller and Digger pamphlets; Federalists and Antifederalists, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, Paine’s Rights of Man, and Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman.