360°: Origins of Freedom

In their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow place the question of freedom as a central concern of all (pre)history.  Their interest in the past is presented as a guide to the present and future, and they search for three kinds of freedom, which they call “primordial”: (1) freedom to move, (2) freedom to disobey, and (3) freedom to change one’s social relationships or form of social organization.  The importance of the study of the past is not about material or social inequalities but becomes one of asking how we have found ourselves recently “stuck” in systems that deny these freedoms?  In this course, taught by Casey Barrier, we will engage the long archaeological and ethnographic records, including that of hunter-gatherers as well as states, to assess the material and social conditions that have opened spaces for freedoms and closed doors on others.  We will tease apart various notions of freedom and try to locate them in diverse cultural moments under varying relations of kinship, property, labor, egalitarianism, and material inequality.  We will question the ontological (or “primordial”) status of freedom to consider if mobility, disobedience, and social-organizational shifts could also be experienced as “unfreedoms” in the creation and enforcement of both egalitarian and inegalitarian relations.  Students will be encouraged to think about the importance of the past from the vantage of their own political desires for the present and future, and we will force ourselves to consider the enduring question:  can we even find our future somewhere in the past?  In the background, we will also continuously return to the question of our relationship to nature/environment and what human freedom may mean at this enlarging spatial, temporal, and ecological scale.

When referring to Rousseau’s political theory, the conjectural state of nature first described in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) has frequently been identified with native societies as observed in America since 1492. In their recent tome The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow assume Rousseau’s state of nature is mostly inspired by the encounter of Europeans with native people, despite scholarly consensus that Rousseau might instead be considered the father of all ‘social construct’ theories. Why is this confusion still informing the way we read Rousseau? How did considerations on the so-called ‘noble savage’ taint his political theory? How can we assess the role an ‘indigenous critique’ played in defining Rousseau’s state of nature? And incidentally: how ‘indigenous’ is this ‘indigenous critique’? Answering to Graeber and Wengrow’s (mis)reading of Rousseau will allow us to cast a new light not only on Rousseau’s ‘unnatural’ anthropology, but also on Graeber & Wengrow’s broader claims on human nature and political freedom. Our end goal is not to offer a scholarly take on either Rousseau’s discourse of Graeber and Wengrow’s book, but to answer this pressing question: should/could we discard the very notion of nature to regain political agency here and now? Taught by Rudy Le Menthéour.

This course, taught by Joel Schlosser, investigates what freedom means, how political communities organize themselves around freedom, and how contestation about freedom is essential in twenty-first century political life. We will take orientation from the argument developed by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, which suggests that freedom and not equality is the site of political struggle today. Expanding from this point of origin, we’ll then consider how theorists and practitioners around the world have considered freedom’s perils and possibilities: abolitionist organizing in the work of Mariame Kaba; democratic socialism in the theory of Axel Honneth; freedom as a mask for state-sanctioned violence in the critical queer work of Chanan Reddy; escape and flight from such states realized through “freedom as marronage”; and freedom as an Indigenous political project in the the work of Taiaiake Alfred, Glen Coulthard, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Each approach will offer an opportunity to think through the meaning and politics of freedom as well as to develop frameworks of political analysis that can illustrate how struggles for freedom shape and structure politics today.