Rawls: We must “look for a conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowments and the contingencies of social circumstance“.

About the Course

In this eight-lecture course, Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks takes us on a journey through the evolution of modern political philosophies from the tensions of Cold War to the turbulent post-9/11 era. Major thinkers covered include: Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, James Buchanan, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Roger Scruton, Sayyid Qutb, Alexander Dugin, and others.
About the Instructor
Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., has been Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois; Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.; Visiting Professor at the University of Kasimir the Great, Poland; Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College of Oxford University; and Visiting Professor at the Jagiellonian University, Poland.

Dr. Hicks is author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Nietzsche and the Nazis, Entrepreneurial Living, Liberalism Pro and Con, and Eight Philosophies of Education. He has published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Review of Metaphysics, and The Wall Street Journal. His writings have been translated into twenty languages.
In 2010, he won his university’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

Course trailer and enrollment options at the Peterson Academy site. Professor Hicks’s other courses — Modern Philosophy, Postmodern Philosophy, Philosophy of Politics: From the Cold War to After 9/11, and Philosophy of Ethics — are available at Peterson Academy.