Visions of Freedom

Overview

Over the last three hundred years, ideas of freedom have changed the world, contributing to the collapse of monarchy, the abolition of slavery, the promotion of women's rights, the rise of national independence movements, the advent of self-government, the rise of capitalism and the rise of communism.  The idea of freedom remains so powerful that both of the parties in any given conflict often argue that they are its defenders.  How can such claims be assessed?  Do we know what it means to speak of a free people; a free government; a free economy; or of personal or moral freedom?  The aim of this cluster will be to develop a critical understanding of various competing conceptions of freedom and of their historical origins.

Courses

Seminar: Literature 97FCS, The Idea of Virtue

Thomas Pfau, Eads Family Professor of English and Professor of German and Germanic Languages & Literature

Our concern in this class will be with the idea of virtue ethics, which dominates Western Culture beginning with Homer and Aristotle.  Virtue ethics is one of the preeminent human ideas of freedom and arguably has no rival until the eighteenth century, at which point a number of other models challenge its hegemony—such as the idea of rights, deontological (duty-based) ethics, moral consequentialism, rational choice theory, etc.– Our course breaks down into two sections: Part I starts out with some short selections from Homer's Iliad, From there we'll move on to read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Sophocles' Antigone.  Next will be some shorter essays by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, and we'll conclude this first half of the class with a reading of St. Thomas Aquinas's treatise on the virtues, arguably the last and most complete account of this concept in Western history. – In Part II we will take up three major works of English literature whose plot and rhetoric is shaped by (and, to an extent, reacts against) the apparent demise of the virtues: Shakespeare's Hamlet, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and George Eliot's Middlemarch.  Some of these readings will be accompanied by some short critical texts. Requirements: 1 four page and 2 six-eight page essays; active participation in class.
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Seminar: English 173FCS Liberty & Literature

Michael Valdez Moses, Associate Professor, Department of English

This course aims to introduce first–year students to several of the foundational texts in the British liberal democratic political tradition and to relate these classic works of political philosophy and social criticism to outstanding literary works concerned with the problems and challenges faced by free societies in modern Europe.  “Liberty & Literature” will give special attention to the debates concerning three particular forms of human freedom: political or civil liberty, the free market, and religious toleration.  

In order to acquaint students with the diversity of theoretical perspectives on question of modern liberty, the course will treat those thinkers whose writings have proved seminal for modern liberalism and who have offered critical appraisals of the relative strengths and weaknesses of modern liberal democratic culture (John Milton, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Richard Cobden, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, F. A. Hayek). Readings in the history of liberal political philosophy will be integrated with the study of several novels focused on the questions of political and personal freedom.  Novels featured in the course in the past few years include Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, which dramatizes the struggle of 17th century Protestant dissidents in Scotland against monarchic absolutism and religious persecution, and the dangers of a militant religious fanaticism; Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, which represents the conflict between the old semi–feudal world of the southern English counties and the new emerging capitalist industrial centers of the North; George Orwell’s 1984, which explores the distopic alternatives to a liberal society represented by twentieth-century totalitarianism; Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, an alternative history of late twentieth-century Britian in which human clones are bred as involuntary organ donors for the rest of the population; and John Banville’s Dr. Copernicus, a historical novel about the rise of modern science and its political, religious, and cultural consequences in 16th century Europe.  Such novels help to illustrate both the vulnerability of an “open society” and the natural and political foundations on which a free society depends.  As the sole English course offered in conjunction with three other freshman seminars that collectively make-up the “Visions of Freedom” Focus cluster, “Liberty & Literature” gives particular attention both to imaginative works of literature and to the history of British and Irish political writing.
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Seminar: Phil 85FCS/ PS 123FCS Freedom & Responsibility

Michael Gillespie, Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Professor, Department of Political Science; Professor, Department of Philosophy; Director, Gerst Program in Political, Economic & Humanistic Studies

The conflicting visions of freedom and responsibility that characterize the modern world; the possibility of leading ethical lives in the face of the conflicting demands that a complex vision of the good engenders.  Readings include Luther, On Christian Liberty; Hobbes, Leviathan; Locke, Second Treatise of Government; Rousseau, Social Contract; Marx, Communist Manifesto; Kant, The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals; and Jack London, The Call of the Wild.  This course aims to be an intense but lively introduction to Western philosophical ideas of freedom and responsibility.
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Seminar: Political Science 85FCS Hierarchy & Spontaneous Order: The Nature of Freedom in Political & Economic Organizations

Scott De Marchi, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science

Many thinkers have argued that hierarchy, and some form of imposed coercive organization, is essential to liberty and human self-realization.  Others, however, have argued that the most important kinds of order and action in human societies are spontaneous and voluntary.  Drawing on some of the great works of political and economic thought, this course will evaluate these positions, examining both ideal and real regimes.
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Focus 99FCS.09 Special Topics in Focus: Visions of Freedom

Michael Gillespie, Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Professor, Department of Political Science; Professor, Department of Philosophy; Director, Gerst Program in Political, Economic & Humanistic Studies

Students and faculty will meet weekly in this half-credit course to discuss issues of common interest that bridge the topics of individual seminar courses. In addition to dinner we will typically have weekly visitors including academics, politicians, journalists, writers, businessmen and women, etc. who meet and talk with students about the ways in which questions of freedom and liberty affect leadership, social relations, public affairs, and other areas of concern.
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