Obtaining a historical understanding of the fundamental criteria of modernity: democracy (5th century BCE), empire (ancient Rome and the medieval Holy Roman Empire), the sovereign state (sixteenth century: Bodin and Machiavelli), the Westphalian international system (seventeenth century), capitalism (eighteenth century: Adam Smith), the nation (eighteenth-nineteenth centuries: Rousseau, Mazzini), constitutionalism (seventeenth-nineteenth centuries: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, J S Mill), Socialism (nineteenth century: Owen, Marx, Lenin), internationalism (eighteenth-twentieth centuries: Kant, Wilson), the Third World (twentieth century: Frantz Fanon).
