POLITICS AND CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION II
  
Thomas Jefferson --- The Rise of Industrialism --- The Bolshevik Revolution
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POL 3223 Dissolution of Medieval Politics: Birth of Modern Politics
CATHOLIC SOCIETY including church-state cooperation, solidaristic economic systems, organic agriculture and spiring Gothic culture reached its apex in the High Middle Ages. Thereafter, the Medieval cultural socio-economic synthesis entered a period of slow decline facilitated by the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, which reopened the doors of pagan antiquity while simultaneously opening the doors leading to secular modernity.
Many forces combined to introduce novel ideas about human nature, the economy, virtue, and statesmanship beginning with fifteenth century political writings of Niccolo Machiavelli whose realpolitik helped set the stage for Absolutism facilitated by Protestant notions of Mercantilism and its political corollary, the Divine Right of Kings. The negative impact of these cultural accretions helped spawn “Contract Theorists” such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau who then set the stage for the “Enlightenment" culminating in the birth of Liberalism engineered by French Philosophes and English Masons to eradicate Catholic culture studied in this course.
GREATEST and GREAT BOOKS INCLUDE:
Belloc: Europe and the Faith, Book Three
Belloc: The French Revolution
Christopher Dawson: English Catholicism and Victorian Liberalism
Machiavelli's: The Prince
Hobbes': Leviathan (excerpts)
Locke's': Treatise on Civil Government (excerpts)
Rousseau's': Social Contract (excerpts)
Voltaire's: Dictionary of Philosophy (excerpts) On Religion, On Toleration
Jonathan Swift's: The Abolition of Christianity (excerpts)
Various Documents of the Philosophes' and French National Assembly: (excerpts)
Marx's: Communist Manifesto
Lenin and Stalin: State and Revolution; Testament; What is to be Done; Purges
Engel's: Industrial Manchester & Early Christianity
Letter from Cloth Merchants at Leeds
Adam Smith's: Wealth of Nations (excerpts)
Charles Dickens': Hard Times (excerpts)
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