Political Philosophy

This course tackles the foundational question of when political authority and coercion can be legitimate, working through it via close readings of major modern theorists — Rawls, Nozick, Gauthier, Marx, and feminist critics like Okin — rather than a survey of topics. You'll spend the semester wrestling with dense primary texts, defending interpretations in discussion, and developing your own position in a term essay alongside a quiz and final. As a required junior-year philosophy course, it builds on earlier ethics and history-of-philosophy work and gives you the conceptual vocabulary (justice, liberty, consent, exploitation) that underwrites almost everything in normative political theory, law, and public policy debates downstream.