Lincoln inspires a return to the "great books"
UCLA Law Professor
Daniel Lowenstein has always held Abraham Lincoln in high regard as a statesman and president, but making time for a serious read of Lincoln's writings was another matter.
Daniel Lowenstein.
"I finally got around to reading his debates 11 or 12 years ago," Lowenstein recalled. "I just loved it and started reading more. At some point I said to myself, 'There cannot possibly be a better model for young people, both for great writing and lucid thinking — and I really should be sharing this with young people.'"
That epiphany led to his creation of a seminar on American political thought that he has teaches at the law school. But his idea continued to evolve, and today finds its expression in the new Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions (CLAFI), where Lowenstein serves as founding director.
An interdisciplinary center in the UCLA Division of Humanities, CLAFI was created to assist students and faculty who would like to make the great works and achievements of western and other civilizations a more central part of their studies. Interestingly, the center embodies both a return to tradition and a contemporary approach to scholarship.
"Traditionally it was believed that study of the great works and achievements of western and other civilizations provided the core of a liberal education, helping young people to think through the great questions of life and preparing them for citizenship in a free society," Lowenstein noted. Today, this concept is referred to as "interdisciplinary."
"CLAFI is very much interdisciplinary in a much more old-fashioned way, back to the idea that literature, philosophy, history and the other arts are interlinked, all concerned with the nature of the human being and the social world," Lowenstein said.
The center will launch its academic program by offering two seminars — one on American political thought, the second on European thinkers — like philosophers John Locke, the baron de Montesquieu, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and others — whose ideas have driven American debates about liberty and political institutions.
CLAFI will also promote knowledge and understanding to non-specialists, said Lowenstein, who envisions mini-lectures, informal "CLAFI klatch" discussion groups and similar activities. An especially ambitious example is the center's upcoming inaugural event, "
The Lincoln Celebration," in which leading scholars will speak in a forum that is "open and accessible to people who are not Ph.D.s or Lincoln specialists, but are interested in American history," Lowenstein said.
The four-day celebration will feature theater, music, lectures and panel discussions in celebration of this year's bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. It opens Wednesday, Nov. 18 with a reading of "The Rivalry," a 1958 play by screenwriter and essayist Norman Corwin about the Lincoln-Stephen A. Douglas debates of 1858, by award-winning Interact Theatre Company.
On Nov. 19, the UCLA Philharmonia and the 100-voice UCLA Chorale will perform "Canticle of Freedom" by Aaron Copland and the
world premiere of the choral work "Lincoln Echoes" by UCLA Associate Professor of Music David S. Lefkowitz. This will be followed by the dramatization "I, Abraham Lincoln," which integrates popular period music with the events leading to Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
The celebration culminates on Nov. 20-21 with an academic conference on Lincoln, with lecturers including Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe and noted Lincoln biographer and scholar Allen Guelzo.
