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The examination will be taken without any notes or books and should be written in pen. You have two hours to complete the examination. Everyone will answer the following questions:

1. In this course we have considered a number of modern view of human nature and the human condition. While modern thinkers disagree on much, they also agree on the importance of certain ends or ideals. And, in doing so, they disagree with pre-modern thought which does not value these ends or ideals as highly. Here are three important modern ideals:
   
1. Self-definition: Our fundamental aims and purposes as human beings are discovered by looking inwards at our wants rather than outwards towards some conception of the cosmos as a whole and our place in it., Happiness consists in satisfying our wants, whatever they happen to be.
   
2. Freedom: Given our inability to reason about what a good, the diversity of human endeavors and actions shows us that human beings may have very different wants from one another. Thus a good polity and society must allow room for a great deal of diversity and freedom. Moreover, freedom consists in removing constraints on the satisfaction of our wants, rather than in discovering our true nature or place in the cosmos. These constraints may include: (i) government restrictions on our choice of what desires to seek to satisfy; (ii) social mores, expectations, and conceptions of how it is best for us to live; (iii) lack of political and economic resources; (iv) natural necessity; and (v) our own irrationality.
   
3. Individualism: Modern political communities demand that individuals be self-directing and self-responsible. Modernity place fewer restrictions on our lives, but also offer us less help in attaining our goals. By the same token, a modern regime does not require us to devote our lives or time or property to the goals of the political community as a whole.

While modern thinkers agree about the importance of these ideals, they may understand them in different ways. Give an account of the views of Locke, Blake, Wordsworth, Marx, and Freud on these two of these three goals. What do each of these writers mean by these goals? Why do they think they are important?

2. While the modern thinkers and writers we have discussed agree on much, they disagree on a great deal as well. Their disagreements in large part result from different views of the tension we have seen between enlightenment and romantic thought. In particular they disagree about:
   
1. Commercial society: Is the liberal strategy of diversion from politics to economics a good or bad thing? Is a life devoted to making money a truly human and satisfying life? Or is it one that is deadening and alienating?
   
2. Equality: To what extent can equality among human beings be sustained? Are people only owed equality with regard to the basic moral rights of life, liberty, and property? Or are they owed political and economic equality as well?
   
3. Enlightenment and Romanticism: To what extent can we combine the enlightenment and romantic aspects of modernity in one view and in one life? Can we conquer nature, be secure in our political rights, and seek a high material standard of living while at the same time fulfilling our deepest desires? Or are these different aims ineluctably in conflict? Can we find our deepest fulfillment in work? Or will modern life always be torn between our enlightenment weekdays and our romantic weekends? 
   
4. Rationality and political and social life: How far can our political and social lives be rationally organized? To what extent is a rational political and social life compatible with human freedom or human nature?

Given an account of how and where Locke, Blake, Wordsworth, Marx, and Freud disagree about two of these four issues.

3. What do you find plausible and implausible about these different views? Which one of these views, if any, do you find most plausible? Or do you find a combination of these views, most plausible? Or would you reject all of these modern views and accept one of the pre-modern views you learned about in IH 51?

You will be expected to answer these questions as fully and completely as you can in two hours. (I will let you stay for the full two hours, however.) You will be expected to know the interpretation(s) developed of these texts in class. But you should feel free to develop alternate interpretations if you are inclined to do so.

These questions may seem, at first sight, terribly difficult. And with good reason. One could spend years studying these different texts. And our judgment about the plausibility of these different views is likely to change, and perhaps improve, as we study and learn more of them and as we come to have more experience of life. (In a sense, the final examination of this course is, as a colleague of mine in the IH program says, the rest of your life! I would be interested to know how your views change over the next ten years.)

But, while these questions are difficult, to judge from your papers and examinations, you are more than prepared to answer them. Your work has shown me that most of you have grasped the central elements of each of these views. I am asking you these comprehensive questions, in large part, to help you consolidate your understanding of these texts and to help you deepen that understanding by comparing and contrasting the views presented in these texts. I also hope to help you see just how much you have learned in this course and how central the issues raised by the course are for your lives.

You can answer these questions in many ways. If you wish, you can simply go down the list and answer the questions in order. You might find that, in doing so, you are tempted to repeat yourself. Please do not waste time doing that but simply refer to me to another part of your essay. Another alternative is for you to write an essay about what you say as the tendencies in or trends in modern thought that, along the way, answered these questions. Thus you can write as close to the question as you wish or exercise your own ingenuity to present your own perspective on modern thought.

In a relatively short time, you can not go very far into depth in answering these questions. I don't expect you to do this. But that does not mean your essay(s) should be shallow. For the point of this examination is for you to show me that you understand the central ideas that animate each text and distinguish it from other texts. The premise of this examination is that it is possible to isolate these central ideas and give a brief explanation them very quickly. Indeed, I think that it is precisely the process of comparison and contrast that would enable you to articulate these central ideas in a concise manner.

A set of notes outlining and comparing these different views will be available on my web site at http://www.stier.net/ih52/notes/overview.html. These notes will help you prepare your answer to the first question. You most certainly do not have to answer these questions in the way I do. As we have seen, there is more than one way to read the texts we have studied. And thus there is certainly more than one way to compare and contrast these texts. That, of course, is not to say that any way of reading the texts are plausible or sound/

In answering the second question, you are a bit more on your own—both on examination day and in the future!