While not a comprehensive list, the following undergraduate courses reflect the themes of the Ordered Liberty Project. Courses like these invite students to grapple with enduring questions about freedom, citizenship, morality, and democracy from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Together, they embody the spirit of the Ordered Liberty Project by cultivating the habits of mind and civic virtues that sustain a free and self-governing society.
1776, Then and Now
(Spring 2026 only)
This course, being offered during America’s 250th anniversary, will explore the origin of the United States through the lens of the American Revolution. The class will examine the founding of the U.S. from multiple perspectives and points of view, as well as the continuing relevance and consequences of those events. What happened, how did it happen, and why does it still matter? With lectures by renowned professors from WashU and around the country, we will invite students to investigate broad-ranging viewpoints on the American Revolution and independence.
Disagreement, Extremism, and Polarization
In this course, students will study disagreement, extremism, and polarization using insights and methods from philosophy, political science, and empirical psychology, with the aim of understanding these phenomena and the social and political challenges they pose. Questions will include whether it is possible for reasonable people to disagree, whether democratic deliberation requires a background of agreement or shared facts, how our moral psychology shapes our political beliefs, whether prejudice and bias can be eliminated from political thinking, and whether there are some political positions that are so extreme they should not be taken seriously.
Free Speech from Spinoza to Trump
This course introduces students to contemporary issues of free speech, including hate speech, the freedom to protest, and social media regulation, and provides a survey of the philosophical and legal history of the principle of freedom of expression. Students will study what Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and the U.S. Supreme Court have said about free speech over the years, before turning to contemporary debates about the validity and scope of free speech.
Free Speech on Campus
Co-taught by Chancellor Andrew Martin and Lee Epstein, the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor, this course, through a series of case studies, explores how the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and association play out in colleges and universities. Readings consist of court decisions, theories, and commentary on free expression, as well as background material on the real-world controversies we analyze.
History of Political Thought
This course offers a critical introduction to the main issues and debates in western political theory, including but not limited to the topics of justice, legitimacy, equality, democracy, liberty, sovereignty, and the role of history in the political and social world. This course is designed to be the first in a three-semester sequence on the history of political thought. The first semester begins with ancient Greek political thought and follows its development up to the early 16th century.
Morality & Markets
Co-taught by English and business faculty, this course uses literature, film, and television to examine and better understand the complex pressures that inform moral choices in a market society. By drawing on tools from modern psychology and business strategy, students learn to think more critically about the relationship between individual morality, free markets, and the societies they both inhabit.
Public Opinion and American Democracy
This course focuses on three key questions in the field of American political behavior: How do we measure public opinion? Which elected officials listen to public opinion? And how can we change public opinion? Students begin the semester by writing letters to each other explaining their political beliefs — a project inspired by Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Adams famously wrote to Jefferson, “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” Jefferson later echoed the statement.
Social Identity and Democratic Deliberation
In this course, students will be exposed to theories of democratic deliberation, standpoint theories in epistemology, and theories of epistemic injustice, and they will be asked to explore several ameliorative theories. Democracy is committed to citizens’ status as political equals, including the right to have an equal say in determining our joint political future. But many core deliberative practices, including argument and testimony, are distorted by individuals’ social identities. The class will proceed according to the following questions: How should argument and testimony work in a democracy? How does social identity, including gender, race, and class, impact us as political agents within a deliberative context? How does our social identity affect our practices of knowledge acquisition, maintenance, and transmission?
The Good Life Between Religion and Politics
This course considers the way religious and political thought has shaped considerations of the classical ethical question of how we should live, and the ways that ethics have often served to connect religion and politics in thought and practice. Do we need a religious basis to answer ethical questions, or can we determine how to live without religious sources of authority? On what basis, and with what capacities, can we imagine new answers to ethical questions — in community or on our own? Taking a philosophical approach through both classic and modern texts, we will consider a range of answers to the question of how we should live, and a range of strategies for imagining the inquiry.
The Practice of Citizenship
This course examines citizenship as both a practice of democratic life and a solution to cooperation problems. It integrates political theory, American political voices, and empirical political science to ask the following questions: What civic capacities sustain democracy, and what obligations do citizens and institutions share in cultivating them? Students engage with classic political thinkers from Aristotle to Martin Luther King Jr., analyze modern empirical studies on trust, polarization, and civic education, and reflect on WashU’s role in preparing citizens.