I finally put the finishing touches on the syllabus for my first college-level course. And the first day of class is only Tuesday, January 18th! The course is POLI 2060; that’s Introduction to Political Theory.
The only hard requirements I had to follow in designing my course is that I had to cover Aristotle’s Ethics and the Federalist Papers. Other thinkers I will be covering include the standard ones: Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. But I’m giving this course a bit of a contemporary international politics spin by emphasizing the relation of man, the State, and war, especially in the latter third of the course. There I cover statist and anarchist socialism (Marx and Bakunin), individualist anarchism (Henry David Thoreau), classical liberalism (Frederic Bastiat and Randolph Bourne), and radical libertarianism (Gerard Radnitzky and Murray N. Rothbard). I finish up with a brief article on “Tolkien vs. Power.”
Check out the syllabus (in pdf format) on my website. Or view it directly.
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the