S1524 Law and Liberty. Political Freedom in the Modern Tradition

The seminar will investigate the origin, development and contemporary condition of the theoretical position in political philosophy called 'liberalism', focusing on the political role of freedom ('liberty') as the core commitment of a modern, pluralist society that is to maintain its social cohesion without unduly infringing upon the individual self-determination of its members. The seminar will read closely and discuss critically classical and modern contributions to political liberalism ranging from Hobbes and Montesquieu through Rousseau and B. Constant as well as Tocqueville, J. S. Mill, I. Berlin and J. Rawls.
After a brief survey of ancient conceptions of political freedom, the course proper will begin with Thomas Hobbes's revolutionary founding of modern political philosophy on the basis of a social contract involving the institution of a sovereign rule fit to maintain peace and prosperity for a state's citizen subjects. The particular focus here will be on Hobbes's influential distinction between liberty as right or individual permission and liberty as obligation involving the regard for the liberty of others. The course will then move on to Baruch Spinoza's radical defense of the freedom to think and to communicate one's thoughts in speech and print unhindered by state control and censorship. Spinoza argues that such freedom is not only compatible with the existence of a modern polity but a requirement thereof. Next the course will turn to the founding figure of political liberalism, John Locke, and his understanding of liberty as an inborn and inalienable right.
From there the course will proceed to Montesquieu's discussion of liberty in the context of the role and the rule of law in a political community. The focus here will be on Montesquieu's conceptual connecting of liberty with obedience to the law and civic responsibility. The civic dimension of liberty is further stressed by the course's next author, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who portrays the contractual origin of the state as the exchange of the dispersive liberty of individual humans beings for the collective liberty of the body politic. With the next pair of authors, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, the course will turn to the analysis of political freedom and civil liberty in the Scottish Enlightenment. The emphasis here will be on the relation between the political society of the state and the commercial society of the market. The chief contribution of the course's next author, Benjamin Constant, to the liberal philosophical tradition is the distinction between ancient and modern liberty, with the former consisting primarily in the public freedom of civic self-rule and the latter in the private freedom of personal self-determination.
The course then will turn to two further founding figures of liberal thought, Alexis de Tocqueville, who contributed influential insights into the possibilities and limitations of liberty in a modern, mass-democratic republic, and J. S. Mill, who tied the meaningful exercise of liberty to the acquisition and exercise of intellectual and moral qualifications. The course will conclude with two key twentieth-century contributors to political liberalism and its philosophical foundation, Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls, with Berlin contributing the crucial but also controversial distinction between a negative and a positive conception of liberty and Rawls presenting the liberal state as a framework for a modern, pluralist society.

Learning Outcomes
On a formal level, students will learn to read closely, reconstruct analytically and assess critically challenging philosophical texts and their complex arguments. In terms of content, students will learn about the past and present of philosophical thinking about political freedom in the modern Western tradition.