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.