History of Freedom

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Hegel’s idea that human history was about the development of the idea of freedom had a huge impact on the way people around the world thought of historical development – enough so that it both inspired Martin Luther King about the progress of freedom and underlay President Barack Obama’s declaration that the long arc of history bends towards justice. Hegel of course died in1831, and, also needless to say, much has happened since then. We will look at Hegel’s own work on this along with two recent works on the role of freedom in history, one by a legal historian and another by a leading sociologist on the origins and fate of this idea and whether the idea itself really makes any sense.