Graduate Institute

Curriculum - History

  • "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."

    Albert Einstein

History Seminar

  • (First-semester students are not eligible to enroll in the history segment)
  • Herodotus: Histories *
  • Thucydides: Peloponnesian War *
  • Livy: Early History of Rome *
  • Polybius: Histories *
  • Plutarch: Lives *
  • Tacitus: Annals *
  • Tocqueville: The Old Regime and the French Revolution *

History Tutorial

  • Augustine: The City of God *
  • Vico: The New Science *
  • Kant: Idea of a Universal History
  • Herder: Ideas Toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind *
  • Hegel: Philosophy of History *
  • Marx: The German Ideology
  • Nietzsche: Uses and Abuses of History for Life
  • Dilthey: Introduction to the Human Sciences *
  • Collingwood: The Idea of History *
  • Strauss: Political Philosophy and History *

History Preceptorial (samples)

  • Tolstoy: War and Peace
  • Machiavelli: The Florentine Histories
  • Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
  • Arendt: The Origin of Totalitarianism

* Readings differ slightly between the two campuses. The lists provided are samples or selections of the full readings.