Political Theory Commons^™

Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, And Religion In Colonial Egypt, Jeffrey Culang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a conceptual history of Egypt’s national formation between the 1880s and the 1930s. This period involved the convergence of nationalism, colonial rule, missionary activity, and new modes of governance at the national and international levels. Drawing on state and missionary archival material, periodicals, legal compendia, laws, and parliamentary transcripts, and adapting methods developed by Reinhart Koselleck, I trace shifts within Egypt’s socio-political lexicon through processes of translation and demonstrate their effects upon social experience and political aspiration. I focus on a set of liberal-secular concepts critical to national politics—religious freedom, public interest, nationality, and the minority—as they …

The Bourgeois Crown: Capitalism And The Monarchy In Thailand, 1946–2016, Puangchon Unchanam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the age of capitalism, monarchy has been treated as if it were an irrelevant institution. Once capitalism becomes the dominant mode of production in a state, it is argued, monarchy must be either abolished or transformed into a constitutional monarchy, a ceremonial institution that plays no significant role in a capitalist state that is ruled by the bourgeoisie. The monarchy of Thailand, however, fits neither of those two narratives, as it enjoys hegemonic status in the capitalist state, preeminent status in the market, and popular support from the urban bourgeoisie. What explains the resilience of the Thai monarchy in …

The New American Slavery: Capitalism And The Ghettoization Of American Prisons As A Profitable Corporate Business, David A. Liburd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial America, with the American plantation being the epicenter for all that was to be produced. While the two have never been completely tied together, capitalism and modern day slavery have been linked with one another. Some analysis sees slavery as a remote form of capitalism, a substitute, to an antiquated form of labor in the modern world.

Slave plantations adopted a new concentration in size and management, referred to by W.E. DuBois as a change "from a family institution to an industrial system."1 …

Thine Is The Kingdom: The Political Thought Of 21st Century Evangelicalism, Joanna Tice Jen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite renewed attention to religion and ethics in political theory, there is a notable absence of inquiry into evangelicalism. Social scientists have studied Christian right policy in the late 20th century, but how has the movement shifted in the new millennium and what are the theoretical beliefs that undergird those shifts? By reading popular devotional writings as political texts, this dissertation distills a three-part evangelical political thought: 1) a theory of time in which teleological eternity complements retroactive re-birth; 2) a theory of being wherein evangelicals learn to strive after their godly potential through a process of emotional self-regulation; and …

Is There A Secular Tradition? On Treason, Government, And Truth, Ali M. Uğurlu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Because the secular is so much part of our modern life, it is not easy to grasp it directly,” writes Talal Asad, in the introduction to his Formations of the Secular. This thesis attempts to obliquely engage with secular power through a concept that has been at the center of much contention in our political present: treason. Taking the failed coup of July 16and the ensuing purge against the Gülen movement in Turkey as its points of departure, it seeks to broach some of the constitutive and operative logics of the modern nation-state. Inquiring into the State’s perennial presupposition …

History And Politics In The Thought Of Karl Jaspers, Nathan Wallace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A relatively overlooked but important work, The Origin and Goal of History, by Karl Jaspers is examined with regard the intellectual history of its development and influence, and its structure and prospects for contemporary and future relevance for political theory. Emphasis is placed on the argument that the central aspect of the work has been neglected in recent, important literature: its connection of a universal historical narrative with a theory of contemporary politics.

Transgender Rights Without A Theory Of Gender?, Paisley Currah

Publications and Research

Why do courts and legislatures ban discrimination based on gender, and increasingly, gender identity, but exempt grooming and dress codes from the protections these laws offer? I argue that culpability for the courts’ and legislatures’ defense of hegemonic gender norms cannot be assigned to transgender rights movement, as some have done. These norms do not regulate only transgender people, they are not minoritizing—and neither should be the politics that seeks to transform them. The thought experiment of this review essay was to sever the analysis of particular political strategies from various assumptions about what gender really is. Agreement on the …

Capitalism And Unfreedom: Louis D. Brandeis And A Liberty Of The Left, Eric L. Apar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The American Right features a well-developed—and well-heeled—infrastructure for promoting a conception of freedom as inextricable from capitalism. The American Left, by contrast, has seemed content to cede the territory, abandoning the ground of freedom for the terrain of “equality,” “justice,” “fairness,” and “prosperity.” This paper is an effort to address this asymmetry in the public discourse over the meaning of freedom. Its principal objective is to capture the vision of freedom embodied in the political and economic thought of Louis D. Brandeis, one of the American Left’s ablest expositors of freedom.

In addition, the paper has three subsidiary objectives. The …

American Civil Associations And The Growth Of American Government: An Appraisal Of Alexis De Tocqueville’S Democracy In America (1835-1840) Applied To Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal And The Post-World War Ii Welfare State, John P. Varacalli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), a French aristocrat, intellectual, and commentator on American society during the 1830’s, described the United States as a society marked by a general “equality of condition,” that is, by a lack of noticeable social and economic distinctions among the citizenry. For Tocqueville, this characteristic of democracy encouraged the formation of an informal political bloc he termed “the majority” - a group who would often elect demagogues to political offices, since the latter were best able to give voice to majority opinion. Furthermore, de Tocqueville believed that this group was not only …

Toward A Reoriented Radicalism: Black Marxism And Orientalism, Alexandros Orphanides

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 21st century has witnessed the unquestioned supremacy of late capitalism. It holds coercive power over nation states; it generates increased inequality within countries and around the globe. It can, today, exploit everywhere at once. The poorest countries in the world reside in the Global South. Of the twenty poorest countries in the world, seventeen are in Africa; the rest are elsewhere in the Global South. Of the hundred poorest countries in world, over 95 percent are in the Global South. In the United States, Blacks, Latinos, and Indigenous people have poverty rates that greatly exceed the national average. Poverty …

Thresholds Of Atrocity: Liberal Violence And The Politics Of Moral Vision, Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All political communities set normative limits to the acceptable use of force. A threshold of atrocity indicates the point at which acceptable violence meets the boundaries of the unacceptable. In liberal democratic states such norms are ostensibly set higher. Hence, there is a theoretical threshold to the modern state’s ability to act in ways that violate norms it claims to uphold. Paradoxically, thresholds of atrocity are almost never breached and unconscionable violence occurs regularly. This study seeks to explain the persistence of extreme violence by developing a theory of atrocity grounded in moral vision. Liberal democratic nation-states are able to …

The Technocratic Politics Of The Common Core State Standards In History, Kate Duguid

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper shows that the explicit aims of the American educational standards for public schools, the Common Core State Standards to teach history to create “college and career ready” students, marks a shift from preparing students for political participation to preparing them for market participation. I trace the intellectual and pedagogical origins of the Common Core’s pretense of technocratic apolitical values back through the previous two major American curricular reform efforts. In the first section I discuss the origins and development of the National History Standards and show how Cold War anxiety prompted a shift in evaluating students as potential …

Cognitive Sociology, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

Cognitive sociology is the study of the conditions under which meaning is constituted through processes of reification. Cognitive sociology traces its origins to writings in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, cognitive and cultural anthropology, and more recently, work done in cultural sociology and cognitive science. Its central questions revolve around locating these processes of reification since the locus of cognition is highly contentious. Researchers consider how individuality is related to notions of society (structures, institutions, systems, etc.) and notions of culture (cultural forms, cultural structures, sub-cultures, etc.). These questions further explore how these answers depend on learning processes …

Charting Syriza's Swift Rise And Fall, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

La France Contemporaine Face Au Défi De La Créolisation, Nathalie Etoke

Publications and Research

Inspired by Jane Gordon's book, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon, this article examines the paradoxes of Creolization within the French context. How do post-colonial French identities of Maghrebi, Sub-Saharan African or Caribbean descent Creolize French society? Instead of being an opportunity that must be seized by the Nation, why is creolization perceived as an imminent threat to the Republic? How can one think of Creolizing politics in the former colonial power? How does Creolization compel us to rethink how we live together? And how does it require us to rethink freedom and equality for all? These are …