Democratic Freedom and Its Enemies

History Department, CEU
Winter Semester 2024

The course introduces students to the great texts of democratic theory, beginning with Aristotle and concluding with John Rawls.

The class also introduces democracy’s most penetrating critics, from Karl Marx to Carl Schmitt. Class-room work will focus on close reading of key texts: for example, Locke’s Letter on Toleration, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Marx On the Jewish Question. Students will learn to situate these texts in their historical context and to see their relevance to contemporary dilemmas and debates.

The overall aim is to show that what democracy is and what it should be are never settled questions. The controversies that divide democracies today can be illuminated by returning to the great thinkers of the past. The key themes will be how democratic theorists have thought about toleration, inequality, colonialism and empire and inclusion.

Students will be expected to think for themselves on these questions, and to learn how to explain texts to their fellow students, demonstrating their historical context and contemporary relevance.

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Human Rights in History

History Department, CEU
Winter Semester 2024

A master’s level course in the history of human rights as the bearer of the claim that what human beings have in common outweighs their differences and that these common needs and obligations should be protected with rights.

After a session on precursors of modern human rights, the course will focus exclusively on the post 1948 period and the emergence of universal human rights, alongside the Nuremberg Trials, the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and the Refugee Convention. After explaining how these pillars of the new architecture of international law were put into place after 1945, the course explores the role of human rights, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, in dismantling European imperialism and segregation in the United States.

Two classes will be devoted to the role that human rights played in the ‘rights revolution’ in European and North American societies from the 1960’s onwards, focusing upon feminism and gay liberation. A class will consider the role that human rights played in the Eastern European revolutions of the 1980’s which overthrew the Soviet Empire.

In the post 1989 period, the focus will be upon the revival of humanitarian intervention and the ‘responsibility to protect’ and conclude in the 21st century with the supposed ‘end times of human rights’: the apparent exhaustion of human rights and the re-emergence of claims of difference—by nation, race, creed, gender, and class– that contest the status of universal rights claims.

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History Writing as a Narrative Art

History Department, CEU
Winter Semester 2024

A six-session, one-credit, pass/fail, intensive reading seminar, on the role of narrative art in historical writing and its impact in shaping the mythologies of nations and the ideologies of political actors.

The first session will begin with readings that seek to understand why narrative endures as a way of writing history. The second session will be devoted to the rhetorical qualities of narrative and their implications for the use of historical evidence. The third session will look at Natalie Zemon Davis’s microhistory and explore the relationship between narrative and historical truth. The fourth session will examine competing classics of nineteenth-century historical narration, Michelet’s and Tocqueville’s histories of the French Revolution, and the fifth will look at how a contemporary historian, Christopher Clark, handles competing and overlapping narratives in The Sleepwalkers (2012) on the origins of World War I. A final session will contrast ‘warring narratives’ devoted to the history of the present: Vladimir Putin’s ‘On the historical unity of the Russians and Ukrainians’ (2021) vs. Serhii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War (2023).

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