Dr Johan Olsthoorn.

This course is available on the MSc in Political Theory. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

An advanced undergraduate course in the History of Political Thought or Political Philosophy, or following consultation with the course teacher.

This course provides an opportunity to study in depth the work of one major political thinker. It will focus on one or a few of the major works of the figure studied, and also consider the main lines of criticism of that thinker, from other contemporary figures, later political philosophers, and modern scholars and critics. It will also be important to consider issues of interpretation, particularly when there are differing controversial readings of the theorist in question. Political thinkers who might be studied would include Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, Aquinas, Marsilius, Dante, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, Hegel, Tocqueville, Marx, and Mill. The course would be taught as a seminar in political philosophy rather than one in intellectual history. The focus would be on understanding and critical engagement with the ideas of the figure under examination rather than on the study of the historical context of their work. In 2014-15 the thinker to be studied is Thomas Hobbes.

20 hours of seminars in the MT.

Students will be expected to submit two formative essays of no more than 1500 words in the fifth and ninth weeks of the term.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (any reasonably recent edition will do in the first instance).

Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (any reasonably recent edition will do in the first instance).

Tom Sorell (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge University Press 1996).

Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge University Press 1997)

Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton University Press 1986).

Essay (100%, 5000 words) in the LT.