September 13, 2015 - 11:10
I.
I'm musing on this passage from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and I'd like to start with some free writing in response to this:
"There is no other country in the world where the law speaks so absolute a language as in America or where the right to apply it is divided among so many hands." (Goldhammer, trans., p. 80)
This seems especially poignant and compelling to me after our experience together on Thursday Friday afternoons. I'd like to write about this for ten minutes and then split up into small groups to talk about what we've written.
II.
After starting with this free writing, I'd like to move to the first of our experimental essays. For each essay, the presenter -- Keires, Riley, or Rosa -- will have the floor for about ten minutes. Then we'll have another twenty minutes to develop the themes and questions that the presenter introduces. As Rosa pointed out on Wednesday, this is really an opportunity for each of you to "teach" the rest of us: facilitating a productive discussion through your writing and engagement with the material. This is also, as I point out in the course syllabus, a chance for you to write for the rest of us, to use your writing for all of our benefit and try out ideas that you'd like to have a hearing (and a response).
We'll have two presenters and then take a break. The third presenter will be first thing after the break.
III.
Since we have only three presenters for this class, I'd like to use the last thirty minutes or so of class to break into small groups once again and focus on particular portions of Tocqueville's text that we haven't yet discussed -- trying to work out what makes Tocqueville potentially useful and helpful for thinking about the "arts of freedom" in America as well as the issues we're encountering in the 360 as a whole around education, inequality, incarceration, race, and politics.