This program is an integrated, eight-course sequence that Lyceum Scholars take together as an intellectual cohort. Scholars who complete the program are awarded the "Political and Legal Theory" minor. Political Science majors can use five of the eight Lyceum classes towards the major.
Lyceum Scholars are introduced to major themes and thinkers in the Western tradition of political theory. Students will examine the fundamental questions of politics: Who should rule? What is law? What is justice? What is the relationship between justice, virtue, and happiness? Readings may include works by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Locke, the American founders, and Nietzsche.
Lyceum Scholars continue to examine how we ought to live and how we ought to live with others. This seminar in ancient political philosophy will help students raise fundamental questions regarding human excellence and political life. Readings include Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero's On Duties, Seneca's Moral Letters, and Epictetus' Handbook.
Lyceum Scholars seek to understand America by considering the impressive reservoir of political and social thought handed down by Americans who have directed their attention to the meaning of our experiment in self-government. Readings range from the Puritans, the Anti-Federalists, and the Federalist to Abraham Lincoln, Stephen F. Douglas, and Frederick Douglass to 20th Century Progressives, Liberals, and Conservatives.
Lyceum Scholars weigh the arguments concerning the social and political arrangements that correlate with the private ownership of the means of production. Students will consider questions of wealth and luxury, private property, commerce and commercial society, and the challenges of socialism. Readings may include works by Locke, Hume, Smith, Tocqueville, Marx, Mises, Hayek, and Rand.
Lyceum Scholars study the roots of modern politics in the political philosophy of seminal English and French Enlightenment thinkers, each of whom offered a searching analysis of modern life and institutions. Readings include Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, and Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality and Social Contract.
Lyceum Scholars consider the political thought of America's founding statesmen and the political principles animating its founding documents. Students will become familiar with the great debates of America's Revolutionary period: first, the debates between the American colonists and English imperial officials culminating in the Declaration of Independence; second, the debates over constitution-making in the newly formed American states; and third, the debates over the framing of the federal Constitution.
Lyceum Scholars explore our constitutional rights and liberties through the careful study of landmark Supreme Court decisions. In particular, students will consider the Court's incorporation of the Bill of Rights as applying to the states and its treatment of questions pertaining to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal protection, racial discrimination, and privacy and personhood rights.
Modern man has created for himself a liberal, democratic, globalized, technological society within which to live. What are the best mental and ethical qualities for living well in such a civilization? What is the state of the human condition in the modern world? In the light of these questions, Lyceum Scholars will examine some of the greatest works in modern literature and philosophy. Readings may include works by Shakespeare, Smith, Mill, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Rand.
