Subject Area: European Studies
This course can also be studied in the following specialisation: History

The three great modern political ideologies – conservatism, liberalism, socialism – are not simply the product of “great thinkers” such as Edmund Burke, John Locke, and Karl Marx but have deep roots in the historical development of European society. They inspired powerful social and political movements which in the course of political conflict mutated into such variants as social democracy, communism, social liberalism, liberal conservatism, and fascism. This course examines the ancestry and the evolution of the major political ideologies in the context of modern European history, combining intellectual with social, economic, and political history, to trace the emergence of modern European political culture and its regional and national variants from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.