In political thinking

Directions: Choose one of the following questions and write an integrated essay answering all parts of it. Make sure that your introduction includes an explicit thesis statement that clearly and explicitly states a specific answer to question. The rest of the paper should then systematically support and defend the interpretative argument you stake out. Your essay should have a title, an introductory paragraph explaining the question or problem you will be addressing and explicitly stating your thesis, a body defending that thesis on the basis of specific quotes or page references to each text, and a concluding paragraph. Use lots of specific page references (or, for Montesquieu, chapter numbers) indicating where each author makes each point you mention.

Do not expect to just sit down at a computer and write this essay in a spontaneous fashion! You will need to allot a good amount of time for first reviewing, collecting relevant quotes, and honing your thesis statement and then for filling in any last missing references you may need at the end.

Your essay should be no more than 4-5 pages, double-spaced. Use 12-point font and normal margins. Make sure that you put your name and the number of the topic on the essay.

Essays are due in class on Tuesday, November 5.

Questions:

1) In political thinking, the relationship between ethics and politics is a recurrent topic. Through the ages, thinkers have discussed whether politics should be subordinated to ethics, or if it should be the opposite. In the work of the ancient Greeks, like Plato or Aristotle, we see a relationship in which politics was subordinate to ethics. In Plato, politics was to guided by the principle of justice; for Aristotle, which politics were but one part of fulfilling teleological ends. By contrast, Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes both seem to understand the relationship between politics and ethics differently than ancient authors did. How do Machiavelli and Hobbes understand the relationship between politics and ethics? How similar are the reasoning and conclusions of the two authors in this regard?

2) Compare St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between morality and political authority with that of Thomas Hobbes. To illustrate the contrast, provide in your discussion 1-2 examples of particular laws from more recent times that Aquinas and Hobbes might explain or evaluate differently, and use logic to explain how their views of those laws would differ.

3) Compare Montesquieu OR Locke’s efforts to limit or prevent the kind of possible abuse of subjects by the sovereign that Hobbes accepts as legitimate with Rousseau’s efforts to curb or prevent such abuses. Whose approach do you find more promising or convincing, and why? In your discussion of Rousseau, be sure to consider how his social contract

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