Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Revisiting Tocqueville's American Woman, Christine Dunn Henderson

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper revisits Tocqueville’s famous portrait of the American female, which begins with assertions of her equality to males but ends with her self-cloistering in the domestic sphere. Taking a cue from Tocqueville’s extended sketch of the “faded” pioneer wife in “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and drawing connections to Tocqueville’s criticisms of the division of industrial labor, I argue that the American girl’s ostensibly free choice to remove herself from public life is not an act of freedom. Rather, it is a manifestation of a particular type of unfreedom that reveals underappreciated connections between the two great dangers about …

Us Trade Policy, China And The Wto (Foreword), Paolo Davide Farah

Book Chapters

In ‘U.S. Trade Policy, China and the WTO’, Nerina Boschiero addresses a key topic in contemporary international economic law and global governance. By focusing on a turning point in global politics and the shaping/framing of trade policy in the U.S.– the election of President Donald Trump sheds light on the tumultuous process of reshaping of global governance. The crisis of multilateralism has been discussed at length in academia and mainstream media. However, little attention has been paid to how the U.S. is reacting to the rise of China in the global order, in practical terms. In particular, focus …

Model Minority Or Myth? Reexamining The Politics Of S.I. Hayakawa, Vivian Yan-Gonzalez

Asian American Studies Faculty Articles and Research

This article problematizes the model minority myth as an analytic in discussions of Asian American conservatism by reassessing the personal and political development of S.I. Hayakawa, Acting President of San Francisco State College during the Third World Liberation Front strike of 1968–1969. Contemporary activists and Asian American studies scholars influenced by the strike’s legacy have seen Hayakawa as a staunch conservative and an advocate of the model minority myth. However, Hayakawa was primarily motivated by his lifelong identification with the liberal tradition and his work as an advocate for racial equality. His realignment as a neoconservative Republican reflected the shifting …

Economic Interdependence And Conflict: An International Relations Theory Analysis, Sam M. Arkin

Glatfelter Gazette

Theories of International Relations are constructed to help make sense of how power is divided amongst international actors. Three prominent theories: Realism, Liberalism, and Neo-Marxism, interpret international phenomena differently based on their assumptions about structures of global power. Economic interdependence is seen by each theory to impact who has power and how that power is maintained. These theories diverge in interpreting how economic interdependence impacts forms of conflict. These pieces do not interpret which theory is correct but work to emphasize the contextual foundations and analytical framework for how each theory perceives the entanglement of economic interdependence and conflict.

The Theoretical Challenges In Ukraine, Andrew Kim

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

The unfolding situation in Ukraine seems like a scene out of the Cold War, the complexity within it not only lies in how fast these events are occurring but also in the unpredictability of Russia’s leader; to address this current conflict requires the acknowledgment of a brief background within these events and also the possible responses which we could expect to see. The following policy brief addresses the matter of the historical influences and challenges that would be facing US national security policy because of the Russia and Ukraine conflict and how this question isn’t a historical question, but rather …

Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 19: Social Evolution's Useful Idiots, Charles H. Smith

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

In today’s world liberals look at conservatives as the villains, and vice versa. How did this come to pass? In this essay a model of the biological roots of liberalism and conservatism is advanced; this is followed by a discussion of why cognitive dissonance may represent the key process in our social evolution. Alfred Russel Wallace’s experience with cognitive dissonance is then detailed, including how he dealt with it.

Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd And Settler Colonialism In India, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent literature on racial capitalism has overwhelmingly focused on the Atlantic settler-slave formation, sidelining the history of European imperialism in Asia. This article addresses this blind spot by recovering the aborted project of British settler colonialism in India through the writings of its most prominent advocate, John Crawfurd. It is argued that Crawfurd’s vision of a liberal empire in India rejected slavery and indigenous dispossession yet remained deeply racialized in its conception of capital, labor, and value. Crawfurd elaborated a “capital theory of race,” which derived racial categories from a civilizational spectrum keyed to the capitalist organization of production. His …

Private Interests In The Public Sphere: The Evolution Of Private Interest Before And During The American Revolution, Jensen Alexander Humphrey

Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

From the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s, mercantilism was the dominant economic doctrine practiced in the politics of the English Empire. To balance foreign trade in favor of exports and bolster the national wealth, however, mercantilists argued in favor of centralizing private commercial interests in the public realm, effectively redefining the public interest as a composition of narrow merchant interests. Restrictive mercantilist policies directed at the American colonies worsened over time, and colonists turned to the theories of John Locke to argue that English mercantilism prohibited colonists from fully realizing their rights to liberty and property. This association of mercantilism with …

Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Limits Of Liberal Anti-Imperialism, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent scholarship has claimed Adam Smith's frontal attack on the mercantile system as a precocious expression of liberal anti-imperialism. This paper argues that settler colonialism in North America represented an important exception and limit to Smith’s anti-imperial commitments. Smith spared agrarian settler colonies from his invective against other imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies because of the colonies’ evidentiary significance for his “system of natural liberty.” Smith’s embrace of settler colonies involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity of these settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from the indigenous peoples. Smith navigated …

The Other China Model: Daoism, Pluralism, And Political Liberalism, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

While scholars often portray Chinese political thought and tradition as standing in opposition to Western notions of political liberalism, little consideration has been given to compatibility between liberalism and Daoism, a prominent religion and long-standing alternative school of thought among Chinese peoples. Addressing this gap in the literature, this study in comparative political thought compares Laozi’s Dao De Jing with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty to illustrate certain core political ideas in the Dao De Jing and their treatment in Mill’s landmark text on political liberalism. Although the two texts diverge in terms of advocacy of popular representation, public contestation, …

A New Twist On The “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay And Lesbian African Weddings In Democratic South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This essay examines the media coverage surrounding two African weddings of lesbian and gay couples in South Africa, as a lens onto the evolving cultural politics of black queerness in that country. Two decades after South Africa launched a world-leading legal framework for LGBTI protections, I argue that these media representations depict the growing inclusion of black LGBTIQ people as a process of bridging the supposed “gap” between homosexuality and African culture. This new “bridging the gap” script seemingly rejects the older, dominant script portraying homosexuality as intrinsically “un-African.” But I argue that it instead reproduces the “un-African” script in …

Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies In Nineteenth-Century America [Table Of Contents], Jason Berger

Literature

Sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to an end—or, at least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens returns to the antebellum United States in order to intervene in a wide field of responses to our present economic and existential precarity. In this incisive study, Berger challenges a shaken but still standing scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, the book uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Xenocitizens glimpses …

For-Profit Managers As Public Fiduciaries: A Neo-Classical Republican Perspective, Rob Atkinson

Scholarly Publications

This Article examines the fiduciary duties of for-profit managers in modern liberal society. To arrive at the right "mix" of these duties, it compares the fiduciary duties implied by a standard descriptive model of our society with two competing normative models: Lockean libertarianism on the "right" and neo-classical republicanism on the "left." This comparison shows that all three versions of liberalism, even the one with a Lockean nightwatchman state, require far more extensive duties than we now expect, including a professionalization of management itself. And it shows that the version of liberalism with the most expansive state, neo-classical republicanism, requires …

The Rawlsian Mirror Of Justice, Jessica Flanigan

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Libertarians(like me) generally disagree with orthodox Rawlsians (like Samuel Freeman) about whether Rawlsian principles of distributive justice are compatible with libertarianism.¹In this essay, I set out to explain why. In section 1, I describe the problem, which is essentially that libertarians think the Rawlsian framework does not rule out anti-statist, capitalist, and broadly libertarian approaches to distributive justice and orthodox Rawlsians think that it does. I propose that this problem arises because the Rawlsian framework is underspecified in two ways. First, the Rawlsian framework has a lot of moving parts, so people with different pre-theoretical intuitions can use …

The Poverty Law Education Of Charles Reich, Felicia Kornbluh, Karen Tani

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay, written for a symposium on the life and legacy of Charles Reich, explores how Reich came to be interested in the field of poverty law and, specifically, the constitutional rights of welfare recipients. The essay emphasizes the influence of two older women in Reich’s life: Justine Wise Polier, the famous New York City family court judge and the mother of one of Reich’s childhood friends, and Elizabeth Wickenden, a contemporary of Polier’s who was a prominent voice in social welfare policymaking and a confidante of high-level federal social welfare administrators. Together, Polier and Wickenden helped educate Reich about …

Democracy Unchained: Contractualism, Individualism, And Independence In Buchanan’S Democratic Theory, John Thrasher

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Contrary to the claims of some of his critics, James Buchanan was an ardent democrat. I argue that Buchanan’s conception of democratic governance organized by a contractually justified constitution is highly distinctive because of his commitment to a strong conception of individualism. For Buchanan, democracy is neither justified instrumentally—by the goods it generates—nor by reference to some antecedent conception of justice. Instead, democracy is the only political option for a society that takes individualism seriously. One implication of this view is that democracies can only be limited by the rules they collectively give themselves in the form of constitutions. I …

Contract Law And The Liberalism Of Fear, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

Liberalism’s concern with human freedom seems related to contractual freedom and thus contract law. There are, however, many strands of liberal thought and which of them best justifies contract is a difficult question. In The Choice Theory of Contracts, Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller offer a vision of contract based on autonomy. Drawing on the work of Joseph Raz, they argue that extending autonomy should be the law’s primary concern, which requires that we extend the range of contractual choices available. While there is much to admire in their work, I argue that autonomy as conceived by Dagan and Heller …

We’Ve Come A Long Way (Baby)! Or Have We? Evolving Intellectual Freedom Issues In The Us And Florida, L. Bryan Cooper, A.D. Beman-Cavallaro

Works of the FIU Libraries

This paper analyzes a shifting landscape of intellectual freedom (IF) in and outside Florida for children, adolescents, teens and adults. National ideals stand in tension with local and state developments, as new threats are visible in historical, legal, and technological context. Examples include doctrinal shifts, legislative bills, electronic surveillance and recent attempts to censor books, classroom texts, and reading lists.

Privacy rights for minors in Florida are increasingly unstable. New assertions of parental rights are part of a larger conservative animus. Proponents of IF can identify a lessening of ideals and standards that began after doctrinal fruition in the 1960s …

Between Commerce And Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, And Commercial Incivility, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought has recently been reclaimed as arobust, albeit short-lived, cosmopolitan critique of European imperialism. Thisessay complicates this interpretation through a study of David Hume’s reflectionson commerce, empire, and slavery. I argue that while Hume condemned thecolonial system of monopoly, war, and conquest, his strictures against empiredid not extend to colonial slavery in the Atlantic. This was because colonialslavery represented a manifestly uncivilinstitution when judged by enlightened metropolitan sensibilities, yet also adecisively commercial institutionpivotal to the eighteenth-century global economy. Confronted by the paradoxical“commercial incivility” of modern slavery, Hume opted for disavowing the linkbetween slavery and commerce, and confined his …

Politics And The Perceived Boundaries Of Science: Activism, Sociology, And Scientific Legitimacy, Chris Scheitle

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Research has suggested that public confidence in the scientific community has become politicized, but it is not clear that liberals and conservatives disagree on the more fundamental question of what counts as being scientific. An analysis of General Social Survey data finds that political conservatism is negatively associated with an individual’s rating of sociology as being scientific. This association is not found when examining ratings of economics or biology. Education moderates this association, as the gap between liberals’ and conservatives’ ratings of sociology’s scientific-ness is greater among those with more education. Although research has demonstrated that trust in the scientific …

American Populism Shouldn’T Have To Embrace Ignorance, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Public ignorance is an inherent threat to democracy. It breeds superstition, prejudice, and error; and it prevents both a clear-eyed understanding of the world and the formulation of wise policies to adapt to that world.

Plato believed it was more than a threat: He thought it characterized democracies, and would lead them inevitably into anarchy and ultimately tyranny. But the liberal democracies of the modern era, grudgingly extending suffrage, have extended public education in parallel, in the hope of cultivating an informed citizenry. Yet today, given the persistence and severity of public ignorance, the ideal of an enlightened electorate seems …

Race, The Condition Of Neo-Liberalism, Vikash Singh

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault’s seminars, Society Must be Defended, and Birth of Bio-politics. Insofar as “race” cannot be understood as a discrete category outside its social, economic, moral, and political embeddedness in liberalism, I argue that methodological individualism and expectations of high-specialization constrain the theorization of race in U.S. scholarship. …

Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Cosmopolitan Overstretch, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Adam Smith has recently been celebrated as a precocious theorist of commercialcosmopolitanism who decried the injustice of imperial conquest and extraction. This paperfocuses on Smith’s endorsement of settler colonialism in North America and argues thatSmith’s newfound cosmopolitanism is overstretched. Smith welcomed settler colonies as theembodiment of the “natural progress of opulence” and spared them from his invective againstother imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies. Smith’s embrace of settlercolonies, however, involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity ofoverseas settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from Native Americans.I contend that Smith muffled this disturbing …

The Failure Of Westphalia: A Constructivist Examination Of Western And Middle Eastern Relations, Jayson Warren

Masters Theses

This thesis is not intended to be a dogmatic or pedantic endorsement of any one religion, ethic, or culture. To the contrary, it is the intent of the author to examine a number of competing ideas, philosophies, and belief systems in order to extrapolate their geopolitical implications and to pursue them to their logical (albeit sometimes inevitable) conclusions. Too often, any number of presuppositions at work within a given situation go overlooked and subsequently skew geopolitical analysis and resulting policy decisions. This thesis seeks to transcend mere opinion or speculation and achieve instead a framework of Constructivism for pragmatic comprehension …

Campesinos, Jóvenes E Inmigrantes: La Ecuación Liberal Y Revolucionaria Chilena Frente Al Estado De Sitio En La Carta A Francisco Bilbao (1852) De Santiago Arcos, Alvaro Kaempfer

Spanish Faculty Publications

This article analyzes Francisco Bilbao’s Letter to Francisco Bilbao (1852) by focusing on the constitutional aspect of his political platform, a liberal revolution conceived to dismantle social, economic and juridical inequalities in order to advance a democratization agenda, and the social construction of its historical protagonist, particularly in terms of the necessary alliance between peasants, youth and immigrants in mid-Nineteenth century Chile.

Friedrich List And The Imperial Origins Of The National Economy, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay offers a critical reexamination of the works of Friedrich List by placing them in the context of nineteenth-century imperial economies. I argue that List's theory of the national economy is characterised by a major ambivalence, as it incorporates both imperial and anti-imperial elements. On the one hand, List pitted his national principle against the British imperialism of free trade and the relations of dependency it heralded for late developers like Germany. On the other hand, his economic nationalism aimed less at dismantling imperial core-periphery relations as a whole than at reproducing these relations domestically and expanding them globally. …

Crime, Morality, And Republicanism, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

One of the abiding concerns of the philosophy of law has been to establish the relationship between law and morality. Within the criminal law, this concern often takes the form of debates over legal moralism--that is, "the position that immorality is sufficient for criminalization" (Alexander 2003: 131). This paper approaches these debates from the perspective of the recently revived republican tradition in politics and law. Contrary to what is usually taken to be liberalism's hostility to legal moralism, and especially to attempts to promote virtue through the criminal law, the republican approach takes the promotion of virtue to be one …

Gender And The American State, E. Mcdonagh, Carol Nackenoff

Political Science Faculty Works

The study of gender in American political development (APD) challenges the efficacy for advancing women’s political inclusion of a liberal tradition valorizing principles of individual equality and positing a separation of the family and the state. Masked are ways in which gender roles and the family are integral to governance and state-building. Gender is both a dependent and an independent variable in APD. Shaped by institutions and policies of the state, it also shapes institutions and policies that promote women’s political citizenship and expand the state’s capacity for social provision—by asserting not only liberal claims of women’s equality with men, …

A Forward To The Special Issue On Neoliberalism In Education The Long Road To Redemption: Critical Pedagogy And The Struggle For The Future, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Peter McLaren introduces a special issue of Texas Education Review focused on Neoliberalism in Education by advocating for critical pedagogy in the face of the challenges and harms wrought by American capitalism, politics, and "economic exploitation, racism, homophobia, sexism, imperialism, the coloniality of power and White supremacy".

Punishment And Inclusion: Race, Membership, And The Limits Of American Liberalism, Andrew Dilts

Law

At the start of the twenty-first century, 1 percent of the U.S. population is behind bars. An additional 3 percent is on parole or probation. In all but two states, incarcerated felons cannot vote, and in three states felon disenfranchisement is for life. More than 5 million adult Americans cannot vote because of a felony-class criminal conviction, meaning that more than 2 percent of otherwise eligible voters are stripped of their political rights. Nationally, fully a third of the disenfranchised are African American, effectively disenfranchising 8 percent of all African Americans in the United States. In Alabama, Kentucky, and Florida, …