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Political Science

Louisiana State University

Theses/Dissertations

Political Theory

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Plato's Republics: A Dramatic Interpretation Of The Early Cities In Plato's "Republic", Simeon Burns May 2023

Plato's Republics: A Dramatic Interpretation Of The Early Cities In Plato's "Republic", Simeon Burns

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation will demonstrate a new methodological approach to reading Plato’s Republic. I develop and apply a dramatic, dynamic hermeneutic to Book II and part of Book III in the text. This method holds that each speech is the product of a preceding agreement or disagreement between two speakers. Agreements lead to the argument’s advancement and disagreements result in a regression to a previous agreement from which to restart the exchange. The focus section is largely on the early exchange Socrates has with Adeimantus. I argue that Socrates is an unwilling participant in the famous discussion on the meaning …


Lucidity And Moral Action In The Theater Of Albert Camus, Stephen Savage May 2021

Lucidity And Moral Action In The Theater Of Albert Camus, Stephen Savage

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study addresses a gap in scholarly research on Albert Camus, first by exploring the place of his theater within his corpus. It divides Camus’s corpus into a set of three mythopoeic cycles: an absurd cycle focused on the Myth of Sisyphus, a cycle on revolt centered on the Myth of Prometheus, and a cycle on judgment centered on the Greek goddess Nemesis. This structure is used to examine how his Camus’s original plays (Caligula, The Misunderstanding, State of Siege, and The Just Assassins) and dramatic adaptations of the works of William Faulkner (Requiem for a Nun) and Fyodor Dostoevsky …


Walter Lippmann's Search For A Sustainable Liberalism, Eric Schmidt Jan 2016

Walter Lippmann's Search For A Sustainable Liberalism, Eric Schmidt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Walter Lippmann’s intellectual journey represents the journey of American liberalism in the 20th century: an attempted return from infatuation with the progressive ideals of inevitable historical development and scientific progress to the stability of human rights and freedom. America’s path to defining its brand of liberalism finds expression in the philosophical works of Lippmann, who was at the center of this struggle. Lippmann was a defender of the liberal democratic state whose value as a thinker derives from his attempt to understand the problem of political freedom (are people competent to self-rule in a mass democracy?) throughout this critical time …


Between Beauty And Duty: Ethics And Judgment In Camus And Kant, Alex Donovan Cole Jan 2015

Between Beauty And Duty: Ethics And Judgment In Camus And Kant, Alex Donovan Cole

LSU Master's Theses

The ideas of Albert Camus and Immanuel Kant are not often thought of as sharing pronounced similarities. However, both thinkers are deeply concerned with role of aesthetics in moral, and subsequently, political life. According to each, taste is a faculty whereby one is able to develop the “moral insight” needed for the flourishing of a robust, thoughtful, ethical individual. Yet, both Camus and Kant utilize highly divergent methodologies in going about this. Camus prefers the artistic form and poetic language offered by the novel and Kant prefers the logical rigor of critical philosophical arguments. This thesis hopes to reveal that …


Eric Voegelin’S Quest To Resist Untruth And Restore The Roots Of Order, Montgomery Carl Erfourth Jan 2013

Eric Voegelin’S Quest To Resist Untruth And Restore The Roots Of Order, Montgomery Carl Erfourth

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis is an exploration of political reality as understood by Eric Voegelin. Voegelin employed the revolutionary concepts found in ancient Greek noetic and Christian pneumatic philosophy that describe political reality and the means to know it. This thesis begins with a biographical sketch of Voegelin, the historical milieu that inspired his resistance to “unreality” and terms and symbols he uses to identify the spiritual sickness he believes is destroying Western Civilization’s traditional basis of order. It then examines Voegelin’s theories of consciousness, philosophy, and science fundamental to understanding reality. Given the extensive nature and volume of his work, a …