Spring 2026 Theme: Democracy as a Way of Life
Democracy is usually seen as a mode of government or form of rule, but advocates and critics of democracy alike have just as frequently thought of it as a social and cultural way of life, a manner of being in the world. Plato called democracy “the most attractive of the regimes . . . like a coat of many colors”; he also worried how democracy toppled the most basic relations of authority. Children defy their parents in a democracy, and students their teachers. Horses and donkeys wander “the streets with total freedom, noses in the air, barging into any passer-by who fails to get out of the way.”
This seminar analyzes democracy as a distinctive way of life as it arose after the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. It begins with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic debates about the meaning of democratic revolution (Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine), segues to the flowering of democratic culture in the United States and its relationship to white supremacy (David Walker, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau), examines the changing meaning of personal agency in mass, industrializing society (John Dewey), and probes the connections between democracy, race, violence, and empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois).