Positive Liberty

You asked for it, I’m teaching it.

Below is a mostly complete syllabus for “Collectivism and Science Fiction,” a blog-class that I plan on teaching over the next few months. I’ve added several works based both on your suggestions and on the need to give a more thorough introduction to collectivist social thought. I couldn’t include everything, and already the reading list is pushing the limits of a semester-length class.

If you want to follow the entire class closely, you may buy nearly all of the copyrighted works at the links provided. The public domain works available online have been linked directly.

I plan to tackle one work a week from the following list. Each will get an extended blog-essay treatment, and the various essays will build upon one another. Expect unplanned supplementals along the way, if I run into other things that might be worth discussing. Each post will be tagged with “Collectivism and Science Fiction” for reference. Please feel free to post comments, either beneath my posts or at your own blogs, and don’t be afraid to take the conversation wherever you like.

The order is tentative, but I’ve tried to interleave theory and fiction so that the course doesn’t bog down in the one or disappear into the ether of the other. I’ve arranged things mostly in thematic order, starting with concepts I consider more foundational. This is probably a huge mistake, but there you have it. Any order except chronological is going to be somewhat arbitrary, and even that would be difficult in a theory/literature mashup like this one.

So anyway, here we go…

Hegel: The Unity and Authenticity of State Experience

G. W. F. Hegel - “The State” from The Philosophy of Right

Cordwainer Smith, “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”

The Knowable Future: Fourier, Saint-Simon, Asimov

Charles Fourier, Selections

Claude-Henri Saint-Simon, “Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Contemporaries.”

Isaac Asimov, Foundation

War and Its Consequences

William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War”

Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Film: Things to Come.

George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler and the World State”

Planning and Planners

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

Edward Mandell House, Philip Dru: Administrator

F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”

Film: Logan’s Run

Mirrors of the Present

Louis-Sebastien Mercier, The Year 2440. It appears that this book is not available in English, which is a shame. Mercier is one of the great and underappreciated writers of eighteenth-century France. A short summary and analysis of The Year 2440 can be found in Robert Darnton’s The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, and if nothing better turns up in the meantime, we’ll go with that.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

Film: Serenity

Totalitarianism I: Hitler and Nazism

Adolf Hitler, “Nation and Race” from Mein Kampf

Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night

Totalitarianism II: Mao and Maoism

Mao Zedong - “On the Proper Method of Handling Contradictions Among the People”

Gene Wolfe - sections on the Ascians from The Book of the New Sun; especially “Loyal to the Group of Seventeen’s Story,” included in this work.

Philip K. Dick, “The Faith of Our Fathers,” in The Eye of the Sibyl

Subject Groups: Gender and Religion

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

Reassessments

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies

Karl Popper, “Has History Any Meaning?” from The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol II.

Charles Stross, Accelerando

…like I said, maybe more than a typical college course. We’ll start with Hegel next week.

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