The Evolution of the City: From Plato’s Polis to Locke’s Liberal State through the Lens of Augustine’s Civitas Dei

Research Paper Instructions

Overview 

This paper will be on the topic previously approved by your instructor. This is an opportunity for you to apply political theory, not merely report on what you have read. As such, you will be required to develop, explain, and offer defenses for anticipated challenges to the thesis of your paper. Papers that merely report on a political thinker, political idea, etc., rather than developing, explaining, and defending a well-crafted thesis will have failed to comply with these instructions.

Topic:

Examine how the idea of a city in Plato’s works revolutionized classical politic, how it merged with Christianity to dominate western civilization seen in the works of Augustine, and how it was later contrasted by Locke when describing what the modern city-state should be.

In your Final Research Paper, you must use at least three of the political thinkers from the course: one must come from the Classical Body Politic (Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero); one must come from one of the Christian Bodies Politic (Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin); and one must come from the one of the Modern Bodies Politics or Diseased Bodies Politic (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Bentham, Mill, Dewey, or Rawls).  

Instructions 

Items to include are outlined as follows: 

• 7-10 double-spaced pages (not including the required title page and bibliography) with default margins and in 12-pt Times New Roman font.
• APA Format  
• Citations to at least 7 scholarly sources, one of which must be the course text, are required. 
• Scriptural excerpts with citations are required in all written assignments, but these do not count toward the required sources 
• Acceptable sources: course text, course notes, course presentations, academic journal articles, and books published by university presses. 

Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.