POLS 2700 - Introduction to Political Theory

• Students will be able to explain the meaning and significance of key concepts such as: nature, freedom, sovereignty, legitimacy, property, coercion, and responsibility in a range of political theories.
• Students will be able to explain the primary normative theoretical approaches in western political thought such as communitarianism, liberalism, utilitarianism, contractarianism, feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories.
• Students will be able to explain and distinguish research methods such as deontology, philosophical anthropology, historical materialism and geneology.
• Students will be able to explain important ethical issues raised by practices of state authority, social and political inequality, and market distribution.
• Students will be able to explain the importance of primary texts and identify a range of accepted secondary interpretations of these texts.
• Students will be able to explain the significance of the historical evolution of key concepts like nature, freedom, sovereignty, legitimacy, property, coercion, and responsibility and how this contributes to contemporary understandings of citizenship.
• Students will be able to critically describe a range of accounts of political power and the role of the state and institutions in these accounts.
• Students will be able to effectively use citation of texts as evidential support for their interpretation of texts.
• Students will be able to assess the role of the historical context, particularly with attention to the role of religion, capitalism and colonialism in shaping the western traditions of political thought.
• Students will be able to critically assess the justifications for political authority and defend their own approach to the question, “what is just political authority?”
• Students will be able to clearly re-trace an argument for just political authority presented in the text and will be able to identify whether an author’s conclusions are logically compelling.