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Welcome to Intellectual Heritage II: The Common Good

This class is about how we live together in the world. That means it’s about politics, but not in the way you might think. When you hear the word politics, you might picture elections, legislation, rallies, candidates you like or can’t stand, ideologies you embrace or reject. We’ll touch on all of that, but we’ll aim to go deeper into the long histories of the political ideas that quietly shape our everyday lives.

In Module 1, we’ll meet two giants of ancient political thought, Aristotle and Confucius, whose visions of order still direct the lives of billions today. In Module 2, we’ll see what happened when those visions collided with ideas of society developed by Indigenous peoples, and how those clashes reshaped both the European and Indigenous world. Module 3 brings us into the modern era, tracing how political traditions were repackaged in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, even as others were discarded.

Again and again, we’ll see our definitions of “the common good” spring from deep wells of tradition. Does that idea comfort you or disturb you? By the end of this course, you’ll have wrestled with these two core questions: to what extent should the past direct the present, and how can we imagine different futures when the roots of our systems run so deep?

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Questions? Reach out anytime.

Robert Yusef Rabiee, Ph.D. · robert.rabiee@temple.edu