Course Description

As an attempt to enforce tolerance—living and let live—the American experiment represents a radical break from ancient and medieval thought. In this highly interdisciplinary course, you will get a chance to read some of the most important texts of the past two thousand years. We’ll begin with some medieval literature to see why intolerance has been the default ethical position for almost all of western history, but we’ll also look at key political treatises from the Renaissance and Enlightenment to understand how tolerance became one of the most important values associated with modernity. How is it that careful thinkers like St. Augustine, John of Salisbury, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Hobbes, Locke, Paine, Smith, Marx, Franklin, Jefferson, and Thoreau could each take such different views of tolerance?

We will be asking under what circumstances intolerance has been justified in the past and in the modern world, and in what cases we might prefer something beyond toleration such as the enthusiastic endorsement of difference. We will survey justifications for persecution in the Western tradition, spanning the Middle Ages through the present day, with a particular interest in the rise of toleration as a founding and guiding principle of the United States. We will examine the dangers associated with difference in homogeneous societies while also exploring some ways that diversity is understood to enrich our culture and our political process. We will read a variety of highly canonical texts dealing implicitly and explicitly with our topic of tolerance, and we will discuss them in their literary, social, historical, and political contexts.

Texts

This class is a grand tour through some of the so-called “Great Books” of Western thought, including Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, and works from the American Revolution by Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and others, including the U.S. Constitution. We will likely end up dropping some things, and reading selections from others, making this ambitious reading list much more manageable than it might appear at first.

Requirements

As with all Honors courses, consistent attendance and active participation are required in this discussion-based seminar. Depending on enrollment, each student will either lead discussion on one of our readings at some point during the semester, or will offer a series of three-minute “leads” to stimulate class discussion throughout the semester. Students are expected to keep a private reading journal which will form the basis of a series of brief response papers. There will be just one shorter analytical paper and a longer term paper on a topic of your choosing.

About the Instructor(s): Richard Obenauf