Sacred Texts & Sources
Shared Freedom keeps a canon of the civic — texts that articulate what free people owe each other.
The Assembly’s Civic Canon
Our first text is the Assembly’s own: the civic canon setting out the four principles, the structure of the orders, and the law of the common life. Members are expected to know it the way citizens should know a constitution — not as trivia but as the terms of belonging.
The Democratic Tradition
- Founding documents of free societies — declarations of independence and rights, charters and constitutions — studied as humanity’s repeated attempts to put dignity into law.
- Mill’s On Liberty — the classic defense of free thought and the harm principle: your freedom ends where another’s begins, and not an inch sooner.
- The Federalist Papers and their critics — the architecture of restrained power: separation, checks, federalism, and why each matters.
- Voices of conscience — Thoreau on civil disobedience, King on the moral arc, Havel on living in truth, Mandela on reconciliation without revenge.
Philosophy of the Open Society
Popper on the paradox of tolerance (the tolerant must not tolerate intolerance), Rawls on justice as fairness, Arendt on the banality of evil and the vita activa — the tradition of thinking seriously about how free societies survive their enemies, including the enemies within.