History, Politics, Law, and Economics
What is justice? What is freedom? Are they conventional, derived from human laws? Does either have a basis in nature? What is the best form of government, and can it be implemented? Do human affairs progress, and to what end? These questions and many more are investigated discussing books such as Aristotle’s Politics, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Johnnies have the opportunity to engage in political debates on the Peloponnesian War or modern global economies in two historic capital cities: Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Reading List
Herodotus Histories
Homer Iliad, Odyssey
Plato Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
Plutarch 鈥淟ycurgus,鈥 鈥淪olon鈥
Thucydides The History of the Peloponnesian War
Livy Early History of Rome
Plutarch 鈥淐aesar,鈥 鈥淐ato the Younger,鈥 鈥淎ntony,鈥 鈥淏rutus鈥
Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince, Discourses
Tacitus Annals
Articles of Confederation
Constitution of the United States ofAmerica
Declaration of Independence
Richard Dedekind Essay on the Theory ofNumbers
Hamilton, Madison, Jay TheFederalist Papers
Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
David Hume Treatise on Human Nature
Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics ofMorals
John Locke Second Treatise on Government
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Social Contract, The Origin of Inequality
Adam Smith Wealth of Nations
Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex
James Baldwin Stranger in the Village, TheFire Next Time
Frederick Douglass Speeches
W. E. B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk
William Faulkner Go Down, Moses
Hamilton, Madison, Jay The Federalist Papers
Edmund Husserl The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
Abraham Lincoln Speeches
Karl Marx Capital, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America
Booker T. Washington 鈥淎tlanta Exposition Address,鈥 鈥淥ur New Citizen,鈥 鈥淒emocracy and Education鈥
United States Supreme Court Decisions
Hannah Arendt The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Thomas Piketty Capital
Edward Gibbon History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West
The Rise and Decline of the Roman Republic
The Literature of War
The information presented is for illustration purposes only and may not reflect the current reading list and preceptorial and study group offerings. Works listed are studied at one or both campuses, although not always in their entirety.