HFIK00001U Politik, samfund og værdier

Course description

This first part of the course, on the history of philosophy, explores how British political philosophy responded to the revolutionary radicalism of the late eighteenth century, with a focus on the works and ideas of William Godwin (1756–1836), founder of philosophical anarchism. Starting with the “Revolution Controversy” between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, we will examine how Godwin developed his radical understanding of human freedom in response to this debate, and how his views evolved as his partnership with Mary Wollstonecraft grew. Through critical readings of his major works, particularly Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), we will investigate his perspectives on the limits of government, the legitimacy of private judgment, and the criteria by which revolutionary activity can be deemed warranted, all with an eye to Godwin’s relevance for political philosophy today.

In the second part of the course, we propose the discussion of concepts that on a theoretical level can help to capture the constitutive tension of the idea of community, namely sensus communis, consensus, dissensus, disagreement. To this purpose we focus on works by Hannah Arendt (particularly her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy), Jean-François Lyotard (“Sensus communis”), and Jacques Rancière (chapters from his books On the Shores of Politics and Disagreement. Our goal in examining these perspectives is to identify their respective presuppositions and to isolate a series of questions relevant to a broader consideration of the topic: What kind of universality is at play in the making of a community of citizens? What role does dissent play in it? Is it possible to settle these questions within the frame of a classical philosophical approach to the political?  

 In the third part of the course we focus on Thomas Christiano’s The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and its Limits (Oxford University Press 2008), which is a very ambitious attempt to provide an egalitarian justification of liberal democracy. Democracy, Christiano argues, is mandated by a certain form of equality. The book explains what this kind of equality consists in, and how it motivates democracy as a political system. Moreover, Christiano shows who grounding democracy in equality explains important normative features of public deliberation, the authority of democracy, as well as the limits of democracy.