The Core Blog

The big theme of the sequence is the politics of individual creativity in the modern world. Most of our attention is given to the early liberals of the 19th century — Benjamin Constant, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. At the end, Friedrich Nietzsche — no liberal — turns up. Even before Nietzsche appears, however, the liberals are challenging the way most people think about the ends of a democratic society, including our own. Instead of equality or tolerance, these thinkers believe the stress in a liberal theory ought to fall on self-creation.

The first class begins with Constant's claim that the modern world is different: Where freedom used to be pursued, especially in ancient Greek city-states, by the collective and in public, modern people live in a privatized world. The premium falls not on participation in the affairs of the city-state — though clearly some people still think collective politics is what matters — but in exploring one's own identity in creative new ways. Constant welcomed this shift, but also warned of its potential dangers. Similarly, John Stuart Mill proposed organizing society as a kind of engine of individual creativity, or what he called "experiments in living."

In our second class, we turn to Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote after a famous visit to the fledging United States. Tocqueville elevates Constant's minor worry about the threats to individuality to a full-blown concern with the "tyranny of the majority." He actually influenced Mill, but it is easy to read Tocqueville diverging very seriously from Mill in his proposals for how to organize society to make it safe for individuality. Where Mill focuses, in On Liberty, on the limitation of state power, Tocqueville offers a far broader range of mechanisms. We will ask, not simply who had the better view, but whether their problem and their solution are relevant today.

Finally, in our third class, we turn to a skeptic. However different they were, Mill and Tocqueville argue that liberal democracy and individual creativity can be reconciled — that, indeed, liberal democracy might be the best society for the achievement of widespread individual creativity. Looking out at the world a half century later, Friedrich Nietzsche reaches a rather different conclusion. Was he right that the worst modern threats to individuality foreseen by Constant, Mill and Tocqueville had come to pass? What kind of alternative did Nietzsche offer to the disaster he saw?

See you in class!

Sam