We'll spend the first part of the period discussing the Letter from the Birmingham, and the statement of the clergymen (you downloaded these last week). These and the video we saw on Friday should give a pretty good insight into the tactic of Passive Resistance espoused by Martin Luther King. You should also be able to recognize the debt King owed to a nineteenth century thinker as he developed this tactic andstrategy.
Mill is considered by many the father of modern libertarian thought. Your headnotes to this article are worth a good read, as they summarize his thinking in language a little easier to comprehend. Some would see Mill's thinking as a corrective to the abuses of majority rule. Others wonder if Mill's thinking, rigorously applied, might not cripple any positive action on the part of government. What are the proper boundaries of government, however? Can any given social program be construed as an infringement on individual liberty?
For Friday, May 10
Read: in The Democratic Idea,
# 36, Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty (Emma Goldman) pp. 177-184
# 29, The Communist Manifesto (excerpts-) (Karl Marx) pp. 137-144
We conclude our semester examination of the Democratic Idea with two essays which challenge Democratic government from very different perspectives. Emma Goldman was an anarchist, feminist, pacifist, and labor organizer who flourished in the early years of the 20th century. A Russian immigrant, she was became a naturalized American citizen in the nineteenth century. Despite constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, her radical views led to her deportation in 1919. She questioned the relationship between the individual and any nation. The events and incidents to which she refers will not make a lot of sense to you. The average citizen living then would have read about them in the daily newspaper. However, events of the past year make her observations worth investigating.
As far as the Communist Manifesto is concerned, We're obviously only going to have time to touch the surface. What I'd like to have you do as you consider this document is to set up two categories in your mind. The first you might call "diagnosis" ... the critique Marx and Engels make of the world of the 19th century and the historical chain of events leading up to the period in which they lived and wrote (1848). The second you might call "prescription," the call to action made. It is possible to be accurate in diagnosis and wrong in prescription (I suppose it is also possible to be wrong in diagnosis and right in prescription), which why this set of categories may be useful to you. .
Final Exam
Due: Friday, May 17, 2002, at the scheduled examination time. Parts 1 and 3 to be done at home and turned in at the time of the in-class examination.
Part One: Identify the sources (document and author) of the twenty-one quotes which you'll find on the print friendly version of this syllabus. (This list was revised, Monday, May 6)
Part Two: Write reactions to three of these of your own choice. As was the case in the first examination, identify the issues involved in the quotation, and react to them. Are you in agreement, or disagreement, or some of each? Why? The best answers will show the reasoning behind the reactions. You may practice for this at home, but you will write the examination, in bluebooks provided. Dictionaries may be used. Notes may not.
Part Three: Write a short essay (3 pages, double spaced) which discusses the following proposition:
The heart of "The Democratic Idea" is not so much found in the form of government,
but in the free and reasoned public exchange of ideas.
The best papers will draw upon the authors and texts which have been central to the course.
Or By Appointment
