American Selves: Individualism, Sociality, and Hierarchy in U.S. Political Culture

Catalog description

This course concerns the problem of selfhood in the history of U.S. culture and politics. The nation's liberal ideals of freedom, based on individual self-possession, have long been troubled by visions of sociality and the realities of difference. How have foundational distinctions between independence and dependence been reshaped by the challenges of interdependence and the hierarchies of class, race, and gender produced by the nation's capitalist economy and its history of social division? Can American individualism survive? Should it? We will track these problems throughout U.S. history, from the founding of the American self at the high tide of classical liberalism, to the history of debates over slavery and freedom of contract, to the advent of corporate capitalism and the “social self,” through the challenge of totalitarianism and mass society, to the rise of “subjectivity” and neoliberal hegemony.