The essential question at the heart of this humanities course is: what does it mean to be free and equal? What are the origins of our modern sense of justice, and how did individuals confront powerful and sometimes tyrannical leaders and institutions with new concepts of freedom? When did people and states start to insist that they were free and that they were equal? How do those past meanings differ from our own? This multidisciplinary course considers a stretch of Western civilization’s history—from the Renaissance to the Age of Democratic Revolutions—in which the values and virtues of individual and corporate liberty and equality were insisted upon by authors, artists, and statesmen. In this period there emerged a new way of social and political organization— self-government—and freedom and equality were considered necessary for self-government. This course will trace the emergence of modern conceptions of freedom and equality through reading and viewing a range of works of politics, literature, art and economics. Students will compare their own experiences of personal freedom and equality with concepts and practices developed in the Early Modern period in Europe, and through this comparison will emerge with a clearer sense of what it means to be free, and what it means to be equal.
