D. Human Systems
D.3 Power and Order (Politics and History)
Course description
Political theory here runs through the classic sequence: Aristotle's classification of governments in the Politics; Machiavelli's The Prince, a ruthless analysis of how a ruler acquires and holds a state, best read alongside the Discourses on Livy for the republican side of his thought that the caricature leaves out; Hobbes's Leviathan and its case for an absolute sovereign as the only alternative to a state of nature; Locke on natural rights and limited government; Rousseau and Montesquieu on the social contract and the separation of powers. The American and French revolutions drew on them directly.
Three comparisons from outside Europe belong here. The debate between Confucian rule by virtuous example and ritual and Legalist rule by codified law and punishment, whose sharpest Legalist voice is Han Feizi, shaped the Chinese imperial state for two thousand years. Kautilya's Arthashastra is a statecraft manual as unsentimental as Machiavelli's, compiled in India well over a thousand years earlier. Al-Farabi's Virtuous City extends the Platonic tradition of political philosophy into the Islamic world.
For the historical scaffold, use a one-volume world history such as Roberts and Westad's Penguin History of the World and work through the major periods: ancient river-valley civilizations and the Axial Age; classical Greece, Rome, Persia, and China; the medieval world's several centers of power; the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment; the Industrial Revolution; the twentieth century's wars and decolonization. Several of these labels (the Axial Age, feudalism, the Scientific Revolution) are historians' constructs that are still argued over; Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution (1996) opens by saying there was no such thing. For the twentieth century, concentrate on the ideological contest of fascism, communism, and liberal democracy, the postwar international institutions, and the decolonization and civil-rights movements that followed. Economics, including Adam Smith, is in E.2.
Checkpoints
Each checkpoint is tagged with the stage of the cycle it tests.| Stage | Checkpoint | Attempts |
|---|---|---|
formalism | State Hobbes's argument for an absolute sovereign and Locke's reply, a paragraph each. | Post the first attempt |
abstraction | Compare the Confucian and Legalist answers to why people obey with Hobbes's answer. | Post the first attempt |
formalism | Build a synchronized timeline from 500 BCE to 1500 CE covering at least three regions, and mark five scientific or technological events on it. | Post the first attempt |
skepticism | Pick one historical event and summarize how two historians explain it differently, and what evidence each leans on. | Post the first attempt |
intuition | Given a primary document you have not seen before, write who produced it, for whom, and what it can and cannot tell you. | Post the first attempt |