MAJOR IN
GLOBAL JUSTICE
The Major in Global Justice will be the flagship program in CLASS that reimagines the study of modern political thought and the social contract in a global frame. The Pathway will be based on
specifically-designed seminars that will address the five great questions shaping the forms of justice and injustice worldwide today, opening students to the most critical thinkers and traditions of
our democratic inheritance.
The Pathway will offer an intensive list of courses taught by CPP’s top faculty in the Humanities and Sciences. The idea behind the Global Justice Seminars will be to train students to read and interpret often the same set of texts from The GIFT Common Core, while reorienting their points of entry into the moral, political and legal universe from which these texts emerge. CPP students who have already taken the seminar on "The Faces of Freedom" (American Institutions 3340) fulfil the gateway requirement in Global Justice. The Director's seminar on “The Faces of Injustice” will serve as the Capstone requirement.
Freedom is unarguably the most fundamental idea in scientific and philosophical conceptions of human life. In truth, no investigation of our social and moral life can do without touching upon either the cognitive dimensions of freedom or the logic of force that physically constitutes it. What is it that makes the idea of freedom so vital to human existence and to the relationship between humanity and other life forms? Certainly, this vitality of the concept cannot be attributed solely to freedom’s cognitive and worldly value: for instance, the right of human beings to physically move and their liberty to think freely. Indeed, it is often claimed that freedom is our only truly universal moral imperative, expressed by every human collectivity and social formation as a normative claim that everyone ought to have such liberties to move and think.
It is by now clear, despite the pervasive denialism that marks the contemporary political condition, that we have entered a planetary age. It is an age inaugurated by the convergence, on the one hand, of the voracious human will to colonize land and expand in space, and, on the other, of the increasingly destructive unfolding of natural events and transhuman forces that are altering the physical face of the planet. The effects of this convergence are not being tempered, let alone ameliorated, by the worsening norms of moral and political conduct in global affairs. Quite the opposite: international institutions and law—whose power to mine, extract, railroad, and police the earth was defined, at their very origin, by punitive imperial interests and juridical visions drafted in nineteenth-century capitals of European nation-states—continue to haunt the planet today.
COMING SOON
Global Justice Seminars (Newly Designed | 2024-27)
What is Inequality?
Law, Politics, Morality
The Human Condition
How Law, Love and Loss Shape Political Faith
Liberalism and its Discontents
A Moral and Philosophical History
The Faces of Injustice
Capstone Seminar in
Global Justice