Responses to Liberalism is both an elective in Xavier’s Department of Philosophy and one of a series of political philosophy courses in an interdisciplinary honors program called Philosophy, Politics, and the Public (PPP). Prior to this class, students must have taken at least three philosophy courses and have had some exposure to the foundational texts of liberalism.
When I was asked to teach the class in the Spring of 2022, my first thought was to structure a more conventional course in the history of philosophy: we would read Burke, Hegel, the civic republicans, and Marx. But the more I thought about what I wanted this course to do for students, the more I wanted to try something different. After all, it’s not the civic republicans keeping us up at night and threatening liberal democratic norms. Students are rightly concerned and confused by the rise in neo-fascist and other illiberal movements across the globe. I wanted this course to be an opportunity to better understand these movements both as a series of philosophical debates, but also as a series of political experiments. We would read Marx, but we would also read Stalin. We would read Schmitt and Burke, but we would also read Mussolini and German nationalists.
The course is structured around loosely defined threads of criticism: conservative, Marxist, communist, anarchist, fascist/totalitarian, and a few contemporary criticisms from the perspective of race and gender. I begin the semester with some of the familiar founding documents of liberalism. I also include Fukuyama’s “The End of History” in order to frame the challenge of the course in a clear and compelling way: are there any viable alternatives to liberalism? I don’t have an answer for students, and I tried my best to set up a course that wasn’t going to push them in a particular direction. It would be a win if students left the course a little less confused but still unsure.
Pedagogically, a course like this requires some care. Teaching texts that might be logically flawed, poorly argued, or disagreeable is one thing, but teaching texts that extol the “virtues” of political systems inseparable from genocide is another. My standard approach—defend the text I’m teaching even when I think it’s wrong—wasn’t going to work. I think the best way to teach material like this isn’t to try and defend the content or play devil’s advocate, but to try to get students to move beyond knee-jerk reactions or unreflective moralism. My constant refrain became: of course it’s scary, but it’s not enough to say it’s scary. Why is it scary? What’s motivating it? The irony is that in order to study these responses to liberalism, you have to approach the content liberally—tolerate and even engage with the obscene—in the hope of a better understanding.
Engaging with some of these texts also required that I consider things I wouldn’t normally have to think about. I didn’t want students walking around campus with swastikas or other fascist or Nazi symbolism all over their required texts. I had to be careful about the particular editions I assigned. And, when I couldn’t find an edition that I felt comfortable asking students to carry around campus, I uploaded PDFs.
As for assignments, the highlights were the discussion boards and informal assignments that encouraged students to connect the readings to the present. Students wrote insightful posts on Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction in contemporary politics, the speeches of Viktor Orbán, alienation in society, the economy, queer liberation, and so on. These are informal assignments that aren’t worth much of their final grade. I think that because these are “discussions” instead of papers, students take more risks and make more interesting connections. I also structured the course around student presentations. There is a lot to be gained by making the students responsible for the class, and for stepping back and facilitating dialogue instead of lecturing.
Xavier is a small, Jesuit, liberal arts college, where upper-level classes have around fifteen students. With a small group, I get to know them, to speak openly and honestly, to be there when they have questions, and to make sure that there isn’t a student at the back of the lecture hall getting more and more convinced of the necessity of redemptive violence. To teach this material responsibly requires a lot of emotional labor: I need students to trust that they can explore and discuss ideas in a healthy and supportive environment. The Jesuits call it cura personalis, care of the whole person, and this course needs a lot of it.
There are things I have changed since the first time I taught the course, and there are things I will change when I teach it again. For example, the first time I taught the course, I included different sections from Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. In the spring of 2024, I thought it was important to include her discussion of antisemitism specifically. In the first iteration of the class, I also spent a lot more time working through the debates between the Marxists and the anarchists. The material didn’t seem to resonate with students. They were more interested in thinking about the ways anarchism connects with and differs from movements like contemporary libertarianism. I’ll keep reworking the material, but I think the overall structure of the course does what I wanted it to do: help students better understand their present moment.
The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editor, Cara S. Greene via cara.greene@coloradocollege.edu, or Editor of the Teaching Beat, Dr. Smrutipriya Pattnaik via smrutipriya23@gmail.com with potential submissions.
Alexis Dianda
Alexis Dianda is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati. In addition to teaching in the Department of Philosophy, she is part of the faculty of Xavier’s Philosophy, Politics, and the Public Honors Program. She teaches courses across the history of philosophy, social-political thought, and moral psychology. Her research primarily focuses on American philosophy. She has recently published Varieties of Experience: William James after the Linguistic Turn (Harvard University Press, 2023), and has authored a number of essays on the American and pragmatic traditions of philosophy.
