Table of Contents
Part 1 – Foundational Concepts
a. Political Authority
Social Contract Theory and its Critics
Thomas Hobbes – Excerpts from Leviathan
Robert Axelrod – Excerpts from The Evolution of Cooperation
John Locke – Excerpts from Second Treatise of Civil Government
David Hume – "Of the Original Contract"
Murray Rothbard – "Society without a State," The Libertarian Forum
Virginia Held – "Non-contractual Society: A Feminist View," Canadian Journal of Philosophy
Charles Mills – Excerpts from The Racial Contract
Obedience to Authority
Plato - Crito
Stanley Milgram - "The Perils of Obedience"
Martin Luther King - "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
M.B.E. Smith - "Is There a Prima Facie Duty to Obey the Law?"
b. Rights
UN – "Universal Declaration of Human Rights"
James Nickel, "Making Sense of Human Rights,"
Robert Nozick – "Libertarian Rights"
c. Justice
David Hume – "Justice as Convention"
John Stuart Mill – "Justice and Utility," excerpts from Utilitarianism,
John Rawls – "A Theory of Justice," excerpts from Theory of Justice
d. Political Liberlism
Michael Sandel – "The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self"
John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,"
Gerald Gaus, "The Moral Foundations of Liberal Neutrality"
Part 2 - Government, The Economy, and Morality
a. Political Economy
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels – "Communist Manifesto"
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels – "Critique of the Gotha Program"
Adam Smith, excerpts from The Wealth of Nations
Charles Wolf – "Market Failure," excerpt from Markets or Governments
Randy Simmons – "Pathological Politics: The Anatomy of Government Failure"
b. Property Rights
John Locke – Excerpts from Second Treatise of Civil Government
Henry George – "The Injustice of Private Property in Land,"
David Schmidtz – "The Institution of Property"
c. Distributive Justice
Robert Nozick – "The Entitlement Theory of Justice"
Friedrich Hayek – "The Atavism of Social Justice"
G.A. Cohen - Why Not Socialism
Philippe Van Parijs - "A Basic Income for All"
e. Freedom
John Stuart Mill – "On Liberty"
Isaiah Berlin – "Two Concepts of Liberty"
Franklin Delano Roosevelt – "The Four Freedoms"
Philip Pettit - "Republican Political Theory"
f. Equality
Kurt Vonnegut – "Harrison Bergeron"
Richard Arneson – "Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare,"
David Schmidtz – "Equal Respect and Equal Shares,"
Jean Jacques Rousseau – "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,"
Catharine MacKinnon, "Difference and Dominance"
Part 3 - Applied Political Philosophy
a. Democratic Deliberation and Voting
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson – "Moral Disagreement in a Democracy,"
Jason Brennan - "Political Liberty: Who Needs It?"
b. Immigration
Michael Huemer – "Is There a Right to Immigrate?"
David Miller – "Immigration: The Case for Limits"
c. Global Distributive Justice
Peter Singer – Excerpts from The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
Thomas Pogge – "World Poverty and Human Rights"
Loren Lomasky - "Liberalism Beyond Borders"