Recommended Texts for the Course
Descartes: Discourse On Method
Pearson
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
Additional Reading
Adrieenne Koch & William Peden, eds., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Modern Library, 1944).
Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (Penguin Books, 1975).
Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson (The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., 1993).
James Gilreath & Douglas Wilson, eds., Thomas Jefferson's Library; A Catalog with the Entries in His Own Order (Library of Congress, 1989).
Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx; The Character of Thomas Jefferson (Vintage Books, 1996, 1998).
Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson; The Art of Power (Random House, 2012) [A book which I just required and haven't finished].
Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers; The Revolutionary Generation (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).
Richard Kennington, "Rene Descartes," in History of Political Philosophy 3rd Edn., ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (The University of Chicago Press, 1987) [The only article I have seen on Descartes as political thinker].
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas I. Cook (Hafner Publishing Co., 1947) [An annotated version].
John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke; An Historical Account of the Argument of the 'Two Treatises of Government' (Cambridge University Press, 1969).
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. & ed., Carnes Lord (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) [A fine translation with extensive notes].
David Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
George F. Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft; What Government Does (Simon & Schuster, 1983). [Will's Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, 1981. Valuable for its reflections on the relation between government and culture.]
Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty" in Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford University Press, 2002) [This essay, the classical statement of 'negative' and 'positive' liberty, has been included in several anthologies.].
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate; The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin Books, 2002).