Liberty, Tyranny, and Resistance in the History of Political Thought

Catalog description

Liberty, tyranny, and resistance feature as prominent concepts in our political lexicon, but their definitions and meanings were redefined and contested in different historical contexts by past political thinkers seeking to either enforce or challenge prevailing orthodoxies. This course will allow students to uncover the genealogies of these prominent concepts by putting the thinkers who had expressed them in dialogue with each other, and to interrogate the ways in which these ideas have been invoked for the purposes of political argument to confront contemporary crises and debates. What is liberty? How many kinds of liberty are there? Is there a difference between resistance and rebellion? Is tyranny a moral or constitutional problem? Does tyranny exist at all? What is the basis of political subjection and when is resistance justified? These are some of the questions that students will be invited to probe through the texts of such authors as Marsilius, Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and to identify the ways in which these intellectuals grappled with them in polemical discourse. By combining a close reading of the texts from the medieval and early modern period with the commentaries found in modern scholarship, the course will foster not only a richer historical understanding of the development of political thought, but also a deeper appreciation of the conceptual foundations that pervade the political challenges of our own times.