We offer a wide range of graduate courses in political thought from antiquity to the present. Survey courses typically explore a wide range of texts within a given period or context (ancient & medieval, early modern, modern, contemporary, American). Courses of this type may be taught as standalone seminars or they may take the form of a weekly graduate seminar attached to an undergraduate lecture course on the same subject. We encourage graduate students to sit in on our undergraduate lectures, especially in areas they have not previously studied.
We also like to offer weekly seminars examining a single text or author, such as (recently) Hobbes's Elements of Law, Machiavelli’s Discourses, Aristotle’s Politics, Plato's Laws, and Hobbes's Leviathan. Other courses explore particular themes or topics within political theory, often straddling periods and approaches: recent examples include "Liberty," "Sovereignty," "Absolutism," and "Political Representation." We also occasionally offer no-credit reading groups, either during or outside the semesters. Plato’s Statesman and Marx’s Capital were both offered recently.
Many of our courses are offered regularly and we try to balance our enthusiasms with our students’ needs. We also welcome student requests for particular material.
We hope soon to launch a new reading guide for incoming graduate students. This will include a wide range of recommended readings, from the canonical core to more idiosyncratic personal suggestions, including notable examples of interpretative scholarship and discussions of different approaches to the study of political thought.