London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Modules

81
Modern political thought

Modern Political Thought involves a study of the great texts in political theory of the modern period from the 17th century. A major focus of this subject will be on the texts of those thinkers who theorise political association in different ways on the basis of a conception of human beings as free and equal individuals, including: Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, J S Mill’s On Liberty, and Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Criticism of this tradition: in particular, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party.

The topics that will be covered through the study of these texts will include: the notions of natural law and natural rights; the social contract; the sovereignty of the state; the general will; the idea of liberty; conservative notions of tradition and community and communist ideas of alienation and revolution.