Foundations of American Democracy - Course Trailer

Welcome to Foundations of American Democracy. This is where it all begins. You might think it's just about the United States, but here we're going to go much deeper and much further back than that. We're going to go to the original ideas, dive into philosophy. What are the rights of the individual, and what rights are they willing to give up to a state in order to have those individual rights protected?

This is something that humanity has struggled with for thousands and thousands of years. But over those thousands and thousands of years, as for the most part, humanity was controlled by kings and emperors, little ideas like democracy started to sprout up in places like ancient Greece and then in Rome. All of these were imperfect, and many of us would argue that never have they quite been perfected just yet.

But it really starts to accelerate in this part of our study, where we're going to see that the Enlightenment in Europe sprouts these questions of, do we even need kings, especially when we just fought a big war against them? Can we create a new type of governance structure?

What you might not realize is the United States, at its founding, was really something of an experiment. A state like the United States did not exist. In fact, in the beginning, it did not even view itself as one state or one country, but a collection of countries.

So, as you'll go through this journey, you're going to see it's a fascinating philosophical deep dive into the ideas of what makes a government function, what power should it have, and what powers should it not have. What powers should go to the aggregate state, the United States, and what powers should go to the individual members, to the states themselves?

How does a population protect themselves from the tyranny of a potential king or the potential dictator? In the coming lessons, we're going to dive deep into the ideals of American democracy. We're going to learn about the debates between the groups, some of whom thought that the federal government should have more power, and others who thought that the states should have more power.

We'll learn how it all played out in our actual Constitution: how what powers are in the hands of the federal government, what powers are in the hands of the state governments, and what powers are in the hands of both. So let's start this journey together. To learn more about these ideas and to get practice with immediate feedback, I encourage you to look at these lessons on KhanAcademy.org.