A photograph of a march during the American Civil Rights movement

GLOBAL JUSTICE
PATHWAY

Our Humanities

Among the core ideas animating The Democracy Institute’s academic pathways is the idea of transition. How do we shape our world in light of the transformations that the planet has begun to undergo? In what ways must we prepare our communities for the inevitable transitions that they will need to make? Transitions in our use of energy. Transitions in our ways of approaching inequality. Transitions, above all, in the relationship between our moral imagination and sense of justice, on the one hand, and contemporary drifts in public policy, regulation, and legislation, on the other. Any imagination of the future must today address the links between our unsustainable use of natural resources, our accelerated technological advancement, and the often violent effects of political distraction. The academic pathways at the Institute are designed to train our students to think about these transitions in our institutions, our humanity, and the Humanities.

Reimagining Justice

The proposed Major in Global Justice reimagines the study of modern legal and political thought and the social contract in a global frame. The pathway will be based on specifically-designed seminars that will address the six great questions shaping the forms of justice and injustice worldwide today, opening students to the most critical thinkers and traditions of our democratic inheritance. Once fully designed and approved for enrollment by the CSU Chancellor's Office, the pathway will offer an intensive list of transdisciplinary courses taught by CPP’s top faculty in the Humanities and Sciences. The idea behind the Global Justice Seminars will be to train students to read and interpret the transformative texts drawn from the global democratic tradition, while reorienting their points of entry into the moral, political, and legal universe from which modern ideals and institutions for justice emerge.

The Major in Global Justice is not currently open for enrollment. For more information on the proposed pathway and The Justice Seminars under design, email democracy@cpp.edu.

WHAT IS
FREEDOM?

Freedom is unarguably the most fundamental idea in scientific and philosophical conceptions of human life. In truth, no investigation of our social and moral life can do without touching upon either the cognitive dimensions of freedom or the logic of force that physically constitutes it. What is it that makes the idea of freedom so vital to human existence and to the relationship between humanity and other life forms? Indeed, it is often claimed that freedom is our only truly universal moral imperative, expressed by every human collectivity and social formation as a normative claim that everyone ought to have such liberties to move and think. What are the consequences of this universal humanism? And how must democratic ideals and institutions respond to its coming deformities and promises?

WHAT IS
JUSTICE?

Whether it is mobilization for civil rights or call to collective action that invoke visions of class struggle and the common good, historical and normative ideas of the political assume that politics in its everyday form sustains a much deeper, transcendental vision of individual and collective interests; that it has at its heart an ambition and end larger than the forces involved in it; that it possesses, in other words, an ideality. Justice is this ideality, a fundamental understanding of what it requires for human beings to judge and separate the right from the wrong. This seminar examines the history of justice and its future through the prism of these difficult judgments about a world less unequal and more free.