The Committee on Social Thought

The Committee on Social Thought was established as a degree-granting body in 1941 by the historian John U. Nef (1899-1988), with the assistance of the economist Frank Knight, the anthropologist Robert Redfield, and Robert M. Hutchins, then President of the University. The committee is a group of diverse scholars sharing a common concern for the unity of the human sciences. It accepts qualified graduate students seeking to pursue their particular studies within this broader context, and aims both to teach precision of scholarship and to foster awareness of the permanent questions at the origin of all learned inquiry.

The primary themes of the committee's intellectual life have continued to be literature, religion, philosophy, politics, history, art and society. Inevitably, the committee does not contain in itself the full range of intellectual disciplines; students find instruction in all parts of the University. Although it offers a variety of courses, seminars, and tutorials, it does not require specific courses. Rather, students, with the advice of committee faculty, discover the points at which study in established disciplines can shape and strengthen their research, and they often work closely with members of other departments. Through its several lecture and seminar series, the committee also seeks to draw on the intellectual world beyond the University.

Students admitted to the committee work toward the Ph.D. There are three principal requirements for this degree: the fundamentals examination, the University foreign language examination and the dissertation. Study for the fundamental exam centers on from twelve to fifteen books, selected by the student in consultation with the faculty. Each student is free to draw from the widest range of works of imaginative literature, religious thought, philosophy, history, political thought, and social theory and ranging in date from classical times to the twentieth century. Non-Western books may also be included. Study of these fundamental works is a kind of general education at the graduate level and helps students to relate their specialized concerns to the broad themes of the committee's intellectual life. Most of the student's books will usually be studied first in formal courses offered by faculty, though books may also be prepared through reading courses, tutorials, or independent study. Preparation for the fundamentals examination generally occupies the first two or three years of a student's program, together with appropriate philological, statistical, and other disciplinary training.

After successful completion of the fundamentals examination, the student writes a dissertation under faculty supervision on an important topic using appropriately specialized skills. A Committee on Social Thought dissertation is expected to combine exact scholarship with broad cultural understanding and literary merit.

As a partial guide, and to suggest the variety of possible programs, there follows a list of titles of some of the dissertations accepted by the Committee since 1980:

• The Cycle of Triads and Pattern of Distance and Flesh: A Study of the Plot of Augustine’s Confessions
  
• Between Natural Law and Positivism: The Emergence of Historical Jurisprudence in Savigny’s Juristische Methodenlehre
  
• Heroism in the Homeric Poems: The Characters of Achilles and Odysseus
  
• Aspects of Law and Society in Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.
  
• Tolstoy on Art: A Study of His Fiction and His Essays in Criticism
  
• Henry James’ Conception of Civilization
  
• The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Inventing Cultural Tradition in the First Austrian Republic
  
• The Practice of Criticism and the Exercise of Reason
  
• Tyrannos and Eleutheria: Tyranny’s Political Character and Contribution to the Classical Polis
  
• Kierkegaard’s Anthropology
  
• Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in Two Classical Traditions
  
• Religion and Nationality: The Worship of Yahweh and Ancient Israel
  
• Socrates’ Defense of the Philosophic Life in Plato’s Phaedo
  
• Liberalism and Community
  
• Love and Marriage in the Novels of Jane Austen
  
• Sufficient Justice: Xenophon’s Anabasis and the Classical View of Ruling
  
• Proust and Saint Simon
  
• The Exemplary Subjectivity of Francis Bacon: The Politics of the European Courts and the Practice of
• Modern Everyday Life
  
• Thucydides’ Argument with Homer
  
• Lexical Structure and Grammatical Categories in Lhasa Tibetan
  
• A Third Wind Overhead: Three Independent Writers under Soviet Power
  
• Logic and Sin in the Writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein
  
• Heidegger and the Place of Logic
  
• An Honest Living: Farming and Ethics in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Vergil’s Georgics
  
• Conscience and Authority: Moral Knowledge, Casuistry, and Identity in the Work of John Milton
  
• The Proustian Dialectic: Salvation in A la recherche du temps perdu
  
• Agency and Tragedy: Hegel’s Philosophy of Action
  
• The Classical Understanding of Republicanism and Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus
  
• Leo Strauss’s Critique of 20th Century Relativism in Natural Right and History
  
• A Rhetoric of Silence: Self-Representation and the Distrust of Words in the Novel of Sensibility
  
• Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics
  
• Nature’s Artistry: Goethe’s Science and Die Wahlverwandtschaften
  
• Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer: The Peak of Modernity and the Problem of Affirmation
  
• Feminism and Liberalism: The Problem of Equality
  
• A Hesitant Dionysos: Nietzsche and the Revelry of Intuition
  
• Conrad’s Case Against Thinking
  
• Reading the Republic as Plato’s Own Apology
  
• Cartesian Theodicy: Descartes’ Quest for Certitude
  
• Plato’s Gorgias and the Power of Speech and Reason in Politics
  
• World Government and the Tension between Reason and Faith in Dante Alighieri’s Monarchia
  
• A House Divided: The Tragedy of Agamemnon
  
• Eros and Ambition in Greek Political Thought
  
• Natural Ends and the Savage Pattern: The Unity of Rousseau’s Thought Revisited
  
• A Sense of Place. Reading Rousseau: The Idea of Natural Freedom
  
• Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study
  
• A Nation of Agents: The Making of the American Social Character
  
• The Problem of Religion in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
  
• A Great Arrangement of Mankind: Edmund Burke’s Principles and Practice of Statesmanship
  
• The Dance of the Muses
  
• Tocqueville Unveiled: A Historian and his Sources in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution
  
• The Search for Biological Causes of Mental Illness
  
• War, Politics, and Writing in Machiavelli’s Art of War
  
• Plato’s Laws on the Roots and Foundation of the Family
  
• The Philosophy of Friendship Aristotle and the Classical Tradition on Friendship and Self-Love
  
• Regions of Sorrow: Spaces of Anxiety and Messianic Tome in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden
  
• Converting the Saints: An Investigation of Religious Conflict using a Study of Protestant Missionary
• Methods in an Early 20th Century Engagement with Mormonism
  
• The Significance of Art in Kant’s Critique of Judgment
  
• Historicism and the Theory of the Avant-Garde
  
• Human Freedom in the Philosophy of Pierre Gassendi
  
• Taking Her Seriously: Penelope and the Plot of Homer’s Odyssey

Areas of Study

Work with the committee is not limited with respect to the subject matter; any serious program of study that implies a framework wider than that of a specialized department is appropriate and acceptable in principle. In practice, though, the committee is unwilling to accept a student in those instances when it is unable to provide competent guidance in some special field of interest, either from its own ranks or with the help of other members of the University.

Admission

Students in the committee have unusual scope for independent study, which means that successful work in Social Thought requires mature judgment and considerable individual initiative. Naturally, the committee wishes to be reasonably confident of an entering student's ability to make the most of the opportunities the committee offers and to complete the program of study. Hence, we request that the personal statement required by the University application should take the form of a letter to the committee which addresses the following questions: What intellectual interests, concerns, and aspirations lead you to undertake further study and why do you want to pursue them with the committee? What kind of work do you propose to do here? (If you can, include your intentions for the Fundamentals requirement, further language study, and dissertation research.) How has your education to date prepared you? In addition, you should include a sample of your best written work, preferably relevant to the kind of work you propose to do at the committee. We will return your papers if they are accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Should we consider the evidence submitted to be insufficient, we may ask you to add to it. Applicants are also required to take the Graduate Record Examination.

For an application and the brochure for the Committee on Social Thought contact the Dean of Students, Admissions, Division of the Social Sciences, 1130 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, telephone (773) 702-8415, or the Committee on Social Thought at (773) 702-8410.

This text was last revised on 6/18/2001.