Key Objectives

Upon completing this chapter you should be able to:

1.

Describe the similarities and differences between Plato and Aristotle regarding their views on the ideal society and state.

2.

Explain how the natural law tradition arose, and how St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas distinguished natural law from both human and divine law.

3.

Distinguish the prescriptive natural law of Augustine and Aquinas from the descriptive natural law of Thomas Hobbes.

4.

Explain what contractarian social and political theory is.

5.

Understand the basic similarities and differences between Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the nature of the social contract, the purpose of the state, and its proper organization.

6.

Show how the competing strands of natural rights theory and contractarian theory came together in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights to form the American system of government and American Constitutional theory.

7.

Describe the basic tenets of Marxism.

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