Sections offered SPRING 2024:
#31465 |
MICHAEL RUSHTON |
MW 4:45-6:00 pm |
HU 111 |
HON-H 212 prerequisite: completion of the English composition requirement
Class subtitle: Liberalism and Conservatism; Art, Society, and the State
This course is about various streams of social and political thought from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, along with changes in painting, poetry, and music from the romantic period through modernism. Of particular interest are the interrelationships between political thought and the arts: Are all judgments about the arts purely subjective? Should the state or a cultural elite try to guide society in its cultural practices? Is art autonomous, or inseparable, from moral and political considerations? Do artists have a moral duty to address the political issues of the day? Is it right to sacrifice the welfare of the general population in the pursuit of artistic excellence by, and for, the few? These are important contemporary questions, but, as we will see, they are not new questions.
In addition to examples from the arts, we will read and discuss brief selections from Hume, Kant, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke, Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Ayer, Oakeshott and Keynes. Through these authors, we get a sense of the origins and key principles of liberal and conservative thought, and their influence, or perhaps distance, from liberalism and conservatism in our contemporary world. We will also consider the fate of the arts under totalitarianism, with readings by Hannah Arendt, Czeslaw Milosz, and George Orwell, the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, and the poetry of Anna Akhmatova.