Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 19-23
Supplementary: William Morris, ‘Makeshift’ (1894)

Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 17-18
Supplementary: E.P. Thompson, ‘William Morris’ (1959)

Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 12-16
Supplementary: William Morris, ‘Unattractive Labour’ (1885); Attractive Labour’ (1885); ‘As to Bribing Excellence’ (1895)

Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 8-11
Supplementary: Angela Davis, ‘Abolitionist Alternatives’ in Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003): Chapter 6

Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 4-7
Supplementary: Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854): Chapters 1-2; Lorna Finlayson ‘I was a Child Liberationist’ (2021)

Primary: William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890): Chapters 1-3
Supplementary: William Morris, Review of Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889); ‘Why I am a Communist’ (1894); ‘How Shall We Live Then?’ (1889)

In this final seminar, we will explore how Schmitt concretely applied the ideas we have studied over the last seven weeks. Nowhere is this clearer than in ‘State, Movement, People’ where Schmitt employs his political thought to justify and legitimise the Nazi regime. We will examine how the logical conclusion of Schmitt's political thought is an authoritarian anti-liberal regime predicated upon substantive homogeneity which Schmitt found in Nazi Germany.

‘The Nomos of the Earth’ is a later work by Schmitt and develops key concepts on geopolitics and international law. Through an idiosyncratic understanding of the definition of nomos, Schmitt constructs a genealogy of public international law and state development. We will examine Schmitt’s theory of state development through the tripartite constitution of nomos as appropriation, distribution, and production.

‘Political Romanticism’ is a lesser known work by the early Schmitt. As an early work, it is also particularly abstruse. However, it is very much an important insight into what Schmitt believes is the metaphysical ailment plaguing liberalism: romanticism. In this seminar, we will look at Schmitt’s account of romanticism as ‘subjectified occasionalism’ fortified by the conditions of liberal individualism and connect his criticism of romanticism to his concept of the political and the importance of living an existentially meaningful life.