THE FACES OF FREEDOM
History of American Institutions & Ideals
The Faces of Freedom is The GIFT Project’s award-winning flagship seminar in American Institutions & Ideals, and serves as the gateway course to the
Degree Pathway in Global Justice.
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.
The Question
Our question is simply this: given the logic of this struggle over freedom—a struggle that is animated by interpretations of its legal and judicial safeguard, the constitution—that has defined American ideals and institutions since their inception, what does America’s future look like? If that future still has a place for something resembling an American exceptionalism in the world, to whom does that future belong? Who will have a place in it? And who shall be silenced?
REQUIRED READINGS
Primary Readings
Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2000).
James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings
(New York: Vintage, 2010).
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Michael Joseph, 1963).
Frederick Douglass, The Speeches of Frederick Douglass
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. Joshua Bennett
(1845; New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2023).
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
(1903; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America
(New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1935).
Alexander Hamilton et al, The Federalist Papers (1787-88; New York: Coventry, 2015).
Martin Luther King, Jr., The Radical King, ed. Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016).
Martin Luther King, Jr., Eleven Speeches
(Richton Park, IL: Richton Park Library, 1957-1968).
Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 1835-40
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Cornerstone Readings
These texts are the conceptual and intellectual anchor of the seminar. Foundational to American letters, they provide students with a moral and philosophical arc through the enduring questions that animate the American condition.
Toni Morrison, Beloved
(New York: Vintage, 1987).
W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1920).
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985).
Secondary Readings
This set of Secondary Texts is aimed at developing a set of shared intellectual commitments and conceptual vocabulary. The seminar will use these secondary materials throughout the sections, with the purpose of cultivating a broader, interpretive awareness of why humanistic learning—the commitment to reading and interpretation—remains fundamental to reimagining and regenerating our social and civic contract. The texts and authors chosen here also exemplify the ways in which to develop this interpretive skill, which is one of the key outcomes we strive to accomplish. They help students deepen their understanding of the civic skills that an act of judgment (and dissent) requires when one lives in a democracy. This is why we dedicate a module to rhetoric, letting students closely study how language—free speech—came to be a weapon in America.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (New York: Penguin, 2017).
Sean Conant, ed. The Gettysburg Address: Perspectives on Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, ed. Sean Conant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
(New York: One World, 2021).
Thomas Holt, The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Eddie Glaude, Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (New York: Crown, 2021).
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
SEMINAR SCHEDULE
WEEK ZERO
Ideals against Institutions
We begin by going carefully through the seminar syllabus, work through arguments about ideals and institutions laid out here, and together put in place our conceptual framework for the course in five modular parts. We also begin to read, closely and slowly, the seminar's Cornerstone texts.
Toni Morrison, Beloved.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil.
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen.
MODULE I
THE AMERICAN CONDITION
This module establishes the key and overarching theme of The American Institutions Common Core: the ongoing struggle to fulfil the founding American promise of an egalitarian and democratic society, despite its flawed understandings and often ambivalent commitments to human freedom. In this introductory module, students will be encouraged to examine what Barbara Jordan called the struggle to enlarge the circle of “we, the people.”
America and Amnesia
Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Propaganda of History” in Black Reconstruction in America.
Tracy K. Smith, “Declaration” [Poetry Foundation].
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” in We Were Eight Years in Power.
A Revolutionary Question: What Is Freedom?
Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address” in The Gettysburg Address: Perspectives on Lincoln’s Greatest Speech.
Frederick Douglass, “Constitution, Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?”
Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in The Portable Hannah Arendt.
Judith Shklar, “Conscience and Liberty” in Political Obligation.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” in Four Essays.
Amanda Gorman, “This Sacred Scene,” poem recited at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Constitutions:
Of the Pursuit of Happiness
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Introduction & Chapter 1.
Frederick Douglass, “The American Constitution and the Slave” in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Chapters
3 & 4.
Judith Shklar, “Introduction” to American Citizenship, 1-24.
Sam Wilentz, “Democracy at Gettysburg” in The Gettysburg Address: Perspectives on Lincoln’s Greatest Speech.
MODULE II
FOUNDATIONS THE LETTER OF THE LAW
How could a colonial society, whose most radical spokesmen—like Thomas Paine—believed that human freedom was a matter not of God’s will but a function of “common sense” create a system of laws so steeped in the sovereign right of some men to own others as slaves? This module engages the foundational writings of America’s constitutional heritage that shaped and reshaped its judicial and constitutional order, highlighting the bond between law, political violence, and the contested meanings of the nation’s democratic identity. The texts in this module help students closely study the art of humanistic and humane interpretation—in particular, involving the tortured relationship between the “letter” and “spirit” of the law—that has formed and deformed the core of American jurisprudence and its constitutional guardrails.
The Liberalism of Our Fears
Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear.”
James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook” in The Fire Next Time.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapters 1 & 2.
Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock” in The Portable Hannah Arendt.
Hannah Arendt, “The Perplexities of Rights of Man” in The Portable Hannah Arendt.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President” in We Were Eight Years in Power.
Is Racism an Institution, an Intention or an Ideal?
James Baldwin, “The White Problem” in The Cross of Redemption.
James Baldwin, “Nothing Personal.”
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil.
Hannah Arendt, “Letter to Ralph Ellison.”
Frederick Douglass, “Lessons of the Hour" in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Chapters
3 & 4.
Inequality by
Law
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in
The Radical King.
Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in America.”
Frederick Douglass, “This Decision has Humbled the Nation” in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass.
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen.
Sonia Sotomayor, “Dissenting Opinion” in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. Harvard & UNC.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations” in We Were Eight Years in Power.
Michelle Alexander, “The Fire This Time” in The New Jim Crow.
MODULE III
THE MORAL
ARC
OF AMERICAN PASSIONS
AND ITS RHETORICAL INHERITANCE
This module assembles a new archive of formative moments in American oratory, introducing students to the relationship between public speech and abolitionist justice over three weeks of intensive engagement with texts that they might call—following Hannah Arendt—the “lost treasure” of American rhetoric. This newly assembled archive helps students explore the complex role of American ideals—and its sacrificial vision—in shaping the modern argument
around language, prejudice, and passion.
Rhetoric and the Color Line
Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream.”
Barack Obama, speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
James Baldwin, “Baldwin Debates Buckley,” Cambridge Union.
Octavia Butler, “The Monophobic Response.”
Audrey Lorde, “The Uses of Anger.”
The American Lie
James Baldwin, “On Being White…and Other Lies” in The Cross of Redemption.
James Baldwin, “Black English: A Dishonest Argument” in The Cross of Redemption.
Langston Hughes, “Let America be America Again” [Academy of American Poets].
Eddie Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.
Midterm Research and Writing Break
Writing Week.
MODULE IV
GOVERNMENTS AND
VIRTUES
CIVIL RIGHTS
IN THE
SHADOW OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Few intellectual movements in modern political thought have transcended the murky complexities of the social question—the sickness of modern capitalism—as heroically as American transcendentalism. And yet, from the reservoirs of this heritage also emerges the most galvanizing political idea of the last century: civil disobedience. In this module, students work through the sometimes militant, sometimes conservative thrusts of American pragmatism and the pragmatic approach to political action. In the process, they probe the two extremes of American moral and political commitment: a sacrificial commitment to nonviolent action from which the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s were forged, on the one hand, and an equally resilient nexus of law and political violence that has defined the American condition since its founding, on the other.
The Burden of Disobedience
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in The Radical King.
Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience” in Crises of the Republic.
Henry David Thoreau, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The General Strike” in Black Reconstruction in America.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Children of the Moon” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil.
Voting and its Moral Universe
Judith Shklar, “Voting” in American Citizenship.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Give us the Ballot” in Eleven Speeches.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Dissenting Opinion” in Shelby v Holder on the Voting Rights Act.
Equality: What Happened to the Social Contract?
Judith Shklar, “Earning” in American Citizenship.
Baynard Rustin, A Freedom Budget for All Americans.
Hannah Arendt, “The Social Question” in The Portable Hannah Arendt.
Frederick Douglass, “Sources of Danger to the Republic” in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass.
Judith Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First.”
MODULE V
THE
LIBERALISM
OF
OUR FEARS
This module explores the rise of illiberal challenges to the democratic experiment in America, focusing on the contradictions in modern liberalism at large as they were heightened by post-Cold War challenges to the liberal global order. The question to be pursued in this module is not only about America’s role in shaping that fragile post-war liberal consensus; it is also to closely unpack how America’s fears were—and continue to be—aggravated by its defining role in fashioning the worldwide constitutional experiment: a fear whose populist, anti-globalist rage continues to deform the American democratic project.
American Futures: Of Identity, Freedom & Tragedy
James Baldwin, “We Can Change the Country” in The Cross of Redemption.
Nikole-Hannah Jones, “The Colorblindness Trap.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President was Black: A History of the First African American White House—and of
What Came Next” in We Were Eight Years in Power.
Terisa Siagatonu, “Atlas” [Poetry Foundation].
Final Research and Writing Week
Writing Week.
Final Research Seminar | Presentations
Ideas and Arguments.