As direct heirs of what has been called the “invention of liberty” in the 18th and 19th centuries, we have been obliged to learn new ways of maintaining our individuality in a community made up of millions of other free-wheeling individualists. One strategy, of course, is to go it alone; another is to design large, well-populated states that set out to insure the individual liberty of all members. In this course we will discuss efforts, imagined and real, to reconcile the benefits and liabilities of solitude and society. Experiments in solitude include Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Walden by Henry David Thoreau. The large, well-populated state that emerges from this period is the USA, and the documents are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Thoreau tests the authority of the new nation in his “Civil Disobedience” and J. S. Mill in On Liberty and The Subjection of Women would redefine the terms of the debate for the world that would emerge from “The Age of Enlightenment and Revolution.” Lecture, discussion, short essays written in and out of class.