HIST 642 Modern European Intellectual History II
An introduction to major themes and methods in the study of modern European intellectual history. Emphasis on contextual approaches, on the history of social and political thought, and on the social and political roles of intellectuals. First semester covers the period from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries; explorations of works by Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, the Romantics, Hegel, Marx, Mill, and others. Second semester covers the period from the late nineteenth century to the present, beginning with the critique of liberalism and rationalism in the works of Nietzsche, Pareto, and Freud; examines Durkheim, Weber, and the rise of sociology; the intellectual reaction to the First World War, to communism, and to fascism; and the reformulation of liberal, conservative, and radical thought in the later twentieth century. Previously offered as 626 and 641.