AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS COMMON CORE
Revitalizing American Institutions and Ideals
The GIFT Project, CPP's award-winning initiative, offers a pathway to revitalize the research and study of American Institutions & Ideals across the California State University system. "The Faces of Freedom", developed in collaboration with The Teagle Foundation, is the flagship seminar of the project. The Initiative rests on the idea that reading a common set of texts, from Tocqueville's Democracy in America to Du Bois' Darkwater, for example, is fundamental to our efforts at reactivating the spirit of the American civic contract. "The Faces of Freedom" serves as the Common Core Seminar in the Degree Pathway on Political Nonviolence.
FOUNDATIONS
The Faces of Freedom
Perhaps no country has shaped the trajectory of democracy in the modern world more decisively and more enduringly than the United States of America. It is in America that the modern constitutional tradition is born, along with the ideal and institution of the Declaration of Independence, which many modern states would follow. America’s founding faith was anchored in the belief that a people, when bound together by a shared moral and political vision and restrained collectively by a common purpose and care, can indeed rule itself without the tutelage of human sovereigns or godly masters. Our question in this Common Core Seminar is this: given the logic of this struggle over freedom—a struggle that is animated by interpretations of its legal and judicial safeguard, the constitution—that has defined American ideals and institutions since their inception, what does America’s future look like? If that future still has a place for something resembling an American exceptionalism in the world, to whom does that future belong? Who will have a place in it? And who shall be silenced?
Common Core in Transformative Texts
The Common Core in Transformative Texts is the foundation of The Freedom Seminars, first piloted in Fall 2023 as part of the American Institutions & Ideals redesign. The seminars run for 15 weeks (meeting twice a week), and use this archive of transformative texts as the foundation for the Core’s shared, common syllabus. The Core's lower division seminar places heavy emphasis on primary texts of the founding era leading up to the landmark Reconstruction Amendments. The upper division seminar opens room for close engagement with major texts in contemporary American letters and political thought.
The Faces of Inequality
It is one of the most ironic facts of the modern social contract that the idea of the common good among human beings originates at the same time as the awareness in human consciousness of human inequality. Beginning with Rousseau, the eradication of inequality—of human need and deprivation—has become synonymous with the purpose of our political life and legislations. The precondition of all politics is freedom, it has been said. The purpose of all politics, one might argue, must be equality. This primacy of the will to eradicate inequality—as either good or bad, as either right or wrong— is what Hannah Arendt calls the foundation of “the social question.” In this course, we examine the origins of this story of inequality and its persistent relationship to three core concepts (and structures): property, prejudice, and the human will to power (or starker still, the will to punish). We come to inequality through its beginnings in politics, specifically from the perspective of the history of political and constitutional thought and of legal and moral philosophy. Over five modules, each module anchored in a key concept that signifies a specific form of inequality, we undertake an archaeology of the reinforcing relationship between power, prejudice, and punishment: it is this bond, we will argue, which makes inequality so hard to eradicate.