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This course surveys the debates about
freedom, power, and emancipation in Western political theory. Should freedom
be understood as the absence of coercion, or as the ability to act, and in
particular, act politically? Alternatively, what is the relationship between
freedom and the necessary conditions of its enjoyment? And if freedom
consists in doing what I want, how do I know the content of what I want and
how can I be sure that my desire has not been manufactured or shaped by
outside forces? In a similar fashion, should power be approached as a form of
domination and as a limitation on other people’s choices, or is power
productive, and as such an essential and inescapable ingredient of agency?
The course addresses these questions through an examination of competing
conceptions of freedom and power, in particular in the Liberal, Republican,
Feminist, and Post-Modern traditions, in the works of authors like Hobbes,
Locke, Marx, Berlin, Arendt, Orwell, Foucault, Woolf, Skinner, or Pettit. Special
attention is paid to the socio-economic dimensions of the debates, and to the
recent contribution of gender and identity politics to the dilemmas of
freedom and power.
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