Fall/Winter Timetable

POL485Y1Y L0101

Graduate Course Code: POL2027Y1Y L0101

Topics in Political Thought II

The Politics of Struggle: Hobbes and Thucydides.

Themes

Hobbes’s De Cive or The Citizen and Thucydides’ War of the Athenians and the Peloponnesians offer classic accounts of the world conceived as fundamentally an arena of struggle in which war prevails over peace and competition over community or concord. Thucydides exerted a profound influence on Hobbes, who went to the great trouble of translating him; yet Hobbes remains a distinctively modern thinker and Thucydides an unrepentantly premodern one. We will try to do justice to both.

PLEASE NOTE: POL485/POL2027Y1Y is dual delivery, online synchronous.

Prerequisites

POL320Y1 or POL320Y5 or (POLC73H3 and POLC74H3)