What is Freedom: Modern European Intellectual History

Catalog description

This course explores intellectual life and culture in Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. We will study canonical texts in the history of modern European philosophy and social theory. Key themes we will trace across the texts include the nature of freedom, power, and the relationship between the individual and society. Texts include works by Olaudah Equiano, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault. We will spend each class closely reading the text and reconstructing the arguments. We will also seek to understand these thinkers in the context in which they wrote. How did historical events and movements - slavery, the Enlightenment, revolutions, industrialization, abolition, feminism, and the Holocaust - shape modern ideas about power, freedom, and the self? As we move through the term, we will also be able to see how authors build on one another and put texts in conversation.