I wrote a ton of essays in college, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. My degrees are in political science, philosophy, and history, after all. They range in length from one single-spaced page to five double-spaced pages and beyond.
I’m going to start putting some of these online as part of a new series of posts. There’s some good content in these essays that I think others might find interesting, even if I was a student when I wrote them. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in them now and they aren’t always as radical as I would like them to be now or as I could have written them then. They were written for a grade after all and often rather quickly the night before they were due. Nevertheless, I was often bold — perhaps too bold. Luckily, I had tolerant professors, though they generally didn’t share my (ir)religious and political views.
I’m going to kick things off with the essays I wrote for my doctoral general exams (political theory and international relations) and then follow up with the short reaction papers from my philosophy and political philosophy graduate seminars. Then I’ll see what else I can dredge up that might be worth posting. I’ll be collecting all of these posts in a list on a new College Essays page. There’s a new category and tag devoted to this series as well.
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the