THE FACES OF FREEDOM

The Problem

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 18th century 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.

This wasn’t a vision rooted simply in the negation of England’s monarchical authority; America’s democratic vision put its faith in the people’s commitment to collective checks on illegitimate and unlimited powers and to formal equality in civic association, both guaranteed by the new republic’s written constitution.

At the heart of this positive vision of freedom was also born a distinctive, mutating strain of American conservatism: the suspicion of a strong sovereign, which over time has morphed into white resistance against (federal) government and taxation itself. This conservative ideal of absolute self-government—tethered to an even more absolutist ideal of human freedom—has for two and a half centuries shaped the enduring, complex, and fragile institutions of American government and of the American social experiment. This course is an investigation of these institutions and ideals of American freedom, and of those traditions of political thought and critique that make it exemplary despite itself.

The Paradox

It is paradoxical that all historical and contemporary forms of fascism and ultranationalism—including Christian nationalism—in America begin their war cry against democracy and globalization by using freedom as a rallying point. The most reactionary, hardline group of elected anti-government and antidemocracy representatives in the US Congress today calls itself the Freedom Caucus.

This should give us pause, not only because white supremacy has never entirely disappeared from among those Congressional factions that detest the federal government but also because the use and abuse of liberty—and the rhetoric of rights—raises classical and contemporary philosophical questions about the place and character of human freedom to which America aspires. The roots, fears, and limits of this aspiration be traced back deep into American history and its inextricable relationship with that uniquely American institution: Atlantic slavery.

And yet, the light and burden of freedom in America cannot be yielded so easily to the history of whiteness and white power. For we cannot understand the exemplary philosophical and democratic power of the struggle for Civil Rights without also examining the place of freedom in its political faith and philosophy of citizenship. Thus, we argue in this seminar, the need to understand freedom as a historico-philosophical problem in American political and constitutional consciousness as opposed to seeing in it a universal solution to the complexities of the country’s democratic commitment and of its attraction to racial privilege, violence, and exclusion.