Political Philosophy

>>8985067
You literally cannot start any American political philosophy without starting in England.

Obvious answer to your question is Hobbes and Locke.

Go to the Oxford Bibliographies page for Political Philosophy and look at the General Overviews section

Oxford Biblios requires paid access which you should be able to get through your university, if you're at one. If not I or someone else can hopefully give you a pastebin of the best recs for overviews + their description, I'm just at work right now

File: Start_with_the_greeks.jpg (1MB, 3672x3024px) Image search: [Google]

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>>8985157
Thumbs up. But you cannot start Hobbes and Locke before the Greeks.

Locke, Bentham, and Kant are the main 3 law students have to be familiar with.

>>8985067
History of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

>>8985166
A classical education hasn't been relevant for at least a century, since schools killed off Latin. Just get an annotated edition of whatever you're reading if it's old enough to matter.

>>8985165
Can't someone generate a general access for us all here?
t. smaller university so I doubt we have access.

>>8985303
Not sure what all access it entails, but on the left side click Login with your Library Card and enter B000000000.

>>8985303
>>8985313
It provides only "British and Irish Literature" and "Victorian Literature". Better than nothing.

B000000000 also works for oed.com, oxfordreference.com, and oxforddnb.com.

>>8985313
Library Card not found so obviously it only works for certain universities.
>>8985316
Well considering this is a thread on political philosophy it isn't really much better.

Gosh you all must be dense or at some elite universities that have access to everything.

Looks like the Oxford one (under Philosophy) sucks anyway, there's barely any historical texts in it, it's all very contemporary

>>8985276
>classical education hasn't been relevant since schools killed off classical education

truly inspired me to ponder

>>8985369
That's a simplification. In the late 1800s Latin education was shifted from that of a presently used language (and taught with the pronunciation of one's own language) connecting ancient Rome to our modern civilization, to an archaeological pursuit using the classical pronunciation and focusing only on ancient Rome to the exclusion of all other Western civilization. The motivations do not seem to have been impure, but Latin education died out quickly after this, and thus so did the classical education.

>>8985382
Forgot to mention: at the same time Latin education also shifted in form. The traditional approach was to utilize a reference grammar and essentially force students to memorize the entire thing, page by page. This was replaced by the modern textbook, with carefully graded lessons. I imagine this played a part as well. Professors at the time complained that students no longer entered college with the proficiency in Latin possessed by previous generations.

>>8985067

>Political philosophy

Just get "I am a Pleb" tattooed upon your forehead.

>>8985391
We still had that system of studying Latin. Sadly, 15 year olds who study it for two years without interest, without it also being relevant to the church or any other part of education or the capitalist life, it's wasted.

>>8985067
As it has been said, american political thinking is very much indebted to the canonical european pol. phil. Start there.

For specifically american thinking it would look something like;

Dewey
Mumford
Schlesinger Jr.
Rawls
Rorty
Nussbaum
Niebuhr
Leo Strauss
Kennan
Buckley Jr.
Rand
Du Bois
Wright Mills
Luther King