It's awesome of you to offer advice about grad school, but since I'll be going to France, it's going to be a little bit different. For one thing, I haven't actually "applied" for the Master, because they don't do that. I can just enroll as soon as I prove that my BA is the equivalent of a French licence. I do have a faculty sponsor though, so I know I'll be at Nanterre.
As for my senior thesis, the brief version is that the traditional analysis (the one that goes from Volney to Constant to Marx and beyond) of classical references during the Revolution is that the Revolutionaries were simply trying to imitate Antiquity. This underpins Constant's dichotomy between the liberty of the Ancients (on whose side he groups the Revolutionaries) and the liberty of the Moderns. However, recent work on republicanism and natural rights philosophy both during the Revolution and in the centuries leading up to it, suggests that this dichotomy would have made no sense to the Revolutionaries or the political traditions they were drawing on and to cut a very long story short, their belief in a kind of negative liberty which Philip Pettit calls "liberty as non-domination" (which term has been adopted by Florence Gauthier, Yannick Bosc, et al.) means they fit into neither of Constant's categories.
Now, I, of course, having observed that the Revolutionaries seldom actually seem to attempt to imitate Antiquity in the way they are traditionally assumed to have done (in other words, you can't actually explain the Revolution by saying that Robespierre thought he was Cato and Bonaparte thought he was Caesar, despite the disturbingly large number of authors who seem to think you can), it occurred to me that if Constant was wrong about the whole "liberty of the Ancients vs. liberty of the Moderns" thing, it might be in part because he was basing it on the false premise that the Revolutionaries sought to imitate Antiquity, which then led me to the obvious question: Well, if they're not imitating Antiquity, what is the function of all the references to it? And then: Even if they're not strictly imitating Antiquity, might classical references be linked to the rise of republicanism, since the Res Publica is, after all a Roman idea? and all attendant questions. But of course, the link with republicanism is really just a subset of the larger question, designed so that I can have a topic small enough to cover in 40-60 pages.
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As for my senior thesis, the brief version is that the traditional analysis (the one that goes from Volney to Constant to Marx and beyond) of classical references during the Revolution is that the Revolutionaries were simply trying to imitate Antiquity. This underpins Constant's dichotomy between the liberty of the Ancients (on whose side he groups the Revolutionaries) and the liberty of the Moderns. However, recent work on republicanism and natural rights philosophy both during the Revolution and in the centuries leading up to it, suggests that this dichotomy would have made no sense to the Revolutionaries or the political traditions they were drawing on and to cut a very long story short, their belief in a kind of negative liberty which Philip Pettit calls "liberty as non-domination" (which term has been adopted by Florence Gauthier, Yannick Bosc, et al.) means they fit into neither of Constant's categories.
Now, I, of course, having observed that the Revolutionaries seldom actually seem to attempt to imitate Antiquity in the way they are traditionally assumed to have done (in other words, you can't actually explain the Revolution by saying that Robespierre thought he was Cato and Bonaparte thought he was Caesar, despite the disturbingly large number of authors who seem to think you can), it occurred to me that if Constant was wrong about the whole "liberty of the Ancients vs. liberty of the Moderns" thing, it might be in part because he was basing it on the false premise that the Revolutionaries sought to imitate Antiquity, which then led me to the obvious question: Well, if they're not imitating Antiquity, what is the function of all the references to it? And then: Even if they're not strictly imitating Antiquity, might classical references be linked to the rise of republicanism, since the Res Publica is, after all a Roman idea? and all attendant questions. But of course, the link with republicanism is really just a subset of the larger question, designed so that I can have a topic small enough to cover in 40-60 pages.