WHAT IS FREEDOM?
A Political-Philosophical History
The Problem
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? Certainly, this vitality of the concept cannot be attributed solely to freedom’s cognitive and worldly value: for instance, the right of human beings to physically move and their liberty to think freely. 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. And yet, the Euro-American settler colonial project has shown that this is not the case either.
As history tells us, the cognitive, legal, and physical liberties of human beings can be taken away as easily, as lawfully, by the same world that grants it through legislation. In other words, it is freedom’s political and juridical nature—its relationship to the moral law—that makes its place in our collective thinking about democracy so enduring and complex. Something impenetrable imbues freedom with such transcendental meaning. Let us call this human search for transcendence a triad of sometimes legal, sometimes illegal—often violent—forces and figures. Freedom is a web of passions and desires formed and reformed at the convergence of faith, fear, and force.
The Paradox
Here is the most obstinate paradox of human freedom. Freedom is the only human value that must at once be guaranteed by the law and yet must always exist in opposition, even disobedience, to it. Which perhaps explains why freedom’s true value becomes visible to us only when we are in close proximity to either those who do not have it or those who have lost it entirely. Of this political and juridical vector of freedom, the liberal democratic state has become in our own time the most vexed center. It is not a coincidence that all fascisms begin their war cry against democracy by using freedom as a rallying point. On the iron gate of the Dachau Concentration Camp outside of Munich in Germany, which was one of the first camps that the Nazis set up to initiate their project of extermination, is welded the slogan in iron “Work sets you Free.” What is it about freedom that destroys its own very idea?
The Question
The need to understand freedom as a global problem as opposed to being a universal solution to the complexities of democratic life frames this course. Our interest in this titular question is oriented both towards the past and future of freedom with all its political, legal, and constitutional implications. We are interested in the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship, between political violence and social justice, between the economy and death, between sacrifice and the subject, and ultimately, between action and freedom. We are interested, above all, in recovering a global genealogy of the human condition (and its durability) in the face of tyranny (with infinite, punitive variations). What is freedom today? What does it stand for after the formal end of the era of European colonialism and Atlantic slavery? How do we save the idea from its statist forms without retreating further into the neoliberal and neoconservative arguments about “small government,” which is itself an invitation to the resentments and tyranny of the majority?
In this course, we seek to recover the other idea of freedom, away from its neoliberal and neoconservative visions (with a firm eye on the philosophical seriousness of the modern conservative tradition). A freedom rooted not in mastery but in justice, one in which the history of the citizen-subject is narrated not as a story of civilizational certainty and nationalist, racial triumph but rather as a story of dispossession in which our constitution is not an automatic antidote to violence but a morally fragile commitment that needs democratic faith. We engage in this course with ways in which democratic politics is born from our commitment to such ordinary virtues and vices, to immortal action, and to acts of forgiveness
in the face of tyranny.
REQUIRED READINGS
Primary Readings
Bhimrao Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, with a Reply by Mahatma Gandhi
(Jullundur: Bheem Patrika Publications, 1936).
Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2000).
Hannah Arendt, “Freedom and Politics: A Lecture" (1960).
Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1972).
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
Hannah Arendt, “We, Refugees” (1943).
James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan
(New York: Vintage, 2011).
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen
(New York: Hold, Rinehart, & Winston, 1985).
James Baldwin, “Baldwin debates Buckley at Cambridge Union Hall" (1965).
James Baldwin, “Freedom Day, 1963: The Lost Interview” (2020).
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Michael Joseph, 1963).
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (London: Monthly Review Press,1972).
Frederick Douglass, Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass: One of West India Emancipation…and the other on the Dred Scott Decision (New York, 1857).
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. Joshua Bennett
(1845; New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2023).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
(1903; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox
(1961; New York: Grove Press, 2004).
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at College de France 1978-79
(New York: Picador, 2008).
Michel Foucault, “Subject and Power" (1982).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule
(1909; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
Martin Luther King, Jr. The Radical King, ed. Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016).
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848; New York: Penguin, 2002).
Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear" (1989).
Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Judith Shklar, On Political Obligation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
Secondary Readings
Giorgio Agamben, Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?”, (The Atlantic, 2011).
Sue Halpern, “Why the Right Keeps Saying That the United States Isn't a Democracy”
(The New Yorker, 2020).
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
Andrzej Walicki, “Marx and Freedom" (New York Review of Books, 1983).
SEMINAR SCHEDULE
MODULE I
FREEDOM MEETS DEMOCRACY
Introduction
The Conflict of Interpretations
Sue Halpern, “Why the Right Keeps Saying that the United States Isn't a Democracy.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?”
Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom? in The Portable Hannah Arendt.
Political Passion and Moral Life
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk.
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph.
Michel Foucault, “Subject and Power.”
The Right of the Tyrants
Judith Shklar, “Conscience and Liberty” in On Political Obligation.
James Baldwin, “Baldwin debates Buckley at Cambridge Union Hall, February 1965.”
Frederick Douglass, The Dred Scott Decision: Speech, Delivered, in Part, at the Anniversary of the American Abolition Society.
The Government of the Living (and the Dead)
Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life.”
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics.
Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti.”
Is There
Free Will?
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition,
1-78.
Hannah Arendt, “Freedom and Politics: A Lecture.”
Giorgio Agamben, Karman, 43-86.
MODULE II
WHAT HAS LAW GOT TO
DO WITH
FREEDOM?
The Neoliberal Turn
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality.”
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures I-IV (1-100) and Lectures XI-XII (267-316).
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism.
The Obligation to Disobey
Mohandas Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule.
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Radical Love,” Part I of The Radical King.
Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience” in Crises of the Republic.
Midterm Research
Seminar
Ideas and Essays Workshop I
Two Concepts
of Action
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 175-247.
James Baldwin, “Freedom Day, 1963: The Lost Interview.”
Frantz Fanon, “On Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth.
The Gravity of the Laws
Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear.”
James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind” in The Fire Next Time.
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things
Not Seen.
SPRING BREAK
MODULE III
NEEDS
AND
RIGHTS
Revolutionary Visions
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Andrzej Walicki, “Marx and Freedom.”
Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled” in A Dying Colonialism.
FINAL RESEARCH SEMINAR
Ideas and Essays Workshop II
The Cruelty of Things Not Seen
Judith Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First.”
James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook” in The Fire Next Time.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.
The Liberal Impasse
Is Freedom a Value or a Right?
Hannah Arendt, “We, Refugees.”
Hannah Arendt, “The Perplexities of Rights of Man” in The Portable Hannah Arendt.
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism.
The Problem of Need
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
Bhimrao Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, with a Reply by Mahatma Gandhi.
Hannah Arendt, “The Social Question” in The Portable Hannah Arendt.