Freedom and Power

Content

This course surveys the debates about freedom, power, and emancipation in Western political theory. Should freedom be understood as the absence of coercion, or as the ability to act, and in particular, act politically? Alternatively, what is the relationship between freedom and the necessary conditions of its enjoyment? And if freedom consists in doing what I want, how do I know the content of what I want and how can I be sure that my desire has not been manufactured or shaped by outside forces? In a similar fashion, should power be approached as a form of domination and as a limitation on other people’s choices, or is power productive, and as such an essential and inescapable ingredient of agency? The course addresses these questions through an examination of competing conceptions of freedom and power, in the Liberal, Republican, Feminist, and Post-Modern traditions, surveying the works of authors like Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Berlin, Arendt, Orwell, Foucault, Woolf, Skinner, or Pettit. Special attention is paid to the socio-economic dimensions of the debates, and to the recent contribution of gender and identity politics to the dilemmas of freedom and power.