Social and Political Philosophy II

You'll work through canonical early-modern and 19th-century political thought — Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx — wrestling with the questions they actually fought over: whether reason or passion should guide us, what legitimates the state, and how far justice can be pushed for the sake of good consequences. The course runs on two parallel tracks: a philosophy side that grades you on how well you reconstruct and evaluate arguments, and an English side built on the same texts that pushes the academic reading and essay-writing you started in ENG 101/102. Expect constant short essays, two longer term papers, weekly participation, and presentations, with the primary sources (not secondary commentary) doing the heavy lifting. It's the second half of the social/political sequence and a serious workout in close reading — useful groundwork for later normative theory, ethics, and history-of-philosophy electives.