Prof Lea Ypi

This course is available on the MRes/PhD in Political Science. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course provides an introduction to the philosophical and methodological foundations of political theory. It aims to give doctoral students a comprehensive conceptual toolbox that can be brought to bear on many different substantive problems and research questions in political theory and neighbouring fields and will prepare doctoral students for choosing and reflecting on their methodological approach. The course runs in concurrence with the Political Philosophy Research Seminar and the Doctoral Workshop in Political Theory, complemented by a reading group in the Lent Term on methodological questions in political theory.

20 hours of workshops in the MT. 10 hours of seminars and 20 hours of workshops in the LT. 4 hours of workshops in the ST.

Regular presentations in the reading group.

Some possible choices for the reading group:

• Josiah Ober, Demopolis (Cambridge University Press 2017)
• William Claire Roberts, Marx's Inferno, Princeton University Press (2016).
• Tommie Shelby, Dark Ghetto, Harvard University Press (2016). 
• Timothy Scanlon, Being Realistic about Reasons (OUP 2013).
• Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, CUP 2002.
• Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time, Verso 2014.
• Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, Columbia University Press, 2016.
• Rainer Forst, Normativity and Power, Oxford University Press 2017.
• Daniel Lee, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford University Press 2016).
• Cecile Laborde, Liberalism's Religion, Harvard University Press, 2017. 
• Claire Chambers, Against Marriage, Oxford University Press 2017.

Essay (50%, 4000 words) in the LT.
Essay (50%, 4000 words) in the ST.