Course Description: A Question of Freedom

 Voltaire some 250 years ago said, “When I can do what I want, there is liberty for me.” If this is our working definition of freedom (and I suspect it is), then it still begs several important questions:  “What are the conditions for me doing what I want?”  And, more importantly, “What do I really want?”  Here’s a hypothesis for you to test in the course of your two semesters:  Most of our modern political theory has been devoted to answering the former, but not the latter.  We simply find it too hard to agree about what we do/should want. So we’ve bracketed the latter question, leaving it up to the individual.  But (here’s the tough part of the hypothesis) one can’t really answer the former without giving an implicit answer to the latter. 

Here’s another way of asking the question:  Do all those things that we rightly celebrate in the modern world -- financial abundance, political rights, technological convenience -- give us the sort of flourishing life we want?  What are the costs associated with that kind of life?  (getting the right grades so we can get the right job.  Get the right job so we can get the right income.  Get the right income so we can buy the right house, car, vacations, whatever.) What are the risks we run in staking our claim to happiness and freedom on material prosperity and political rights?  Why, if we’re so politically free, do fewer and fewer of us actually vote?  Why is it that that there have been a multitude of popular movies (American Beauty, Fight Club, Magnolia, to name a few) that focus on emptiness and meaninglessness in contemporary American life?  And how many really believe that they can make a difference in the world of politics? 

So the question quickly gets complicated. Does the pursuit of the “right” stuff feel liberating or suffocating?  Perhaps the pursuit of the conditions of freedom can paralyze us from doing anything we really, really want.  Or maybe freedom, in the end, just leads to boredom… we’re free to colonize our little corner of suburbia, but what then? So what does it mean to talk about freedom in the new millennium?  It’s my argument that we need to address the question of what it is we really want again, and in earnest.

Together, we will read, discuss, and write about various ways in which the fundamental questions of freedom ‑‑ Am I free?  What do I need to be free? ‑‑ have been read and discussed and written about by some of the most profound thinkers in the western intellectual tradition.

As part of the Visions of Freedom Learning community, you have the opportunity to extend the conversations beyond the allotted three hours per week and beyond the ancient, medieval, and renaissance era to the here and now.  You can talk to each other, support each other, and think about how this all relates to your life here at Villanova and to the community in Delurey Hall. 

Further Syllabus Info.