Browsing by Subject "Adam Smith"
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Item Open Access Children or Citizens: Civic Education in Liberal Political Thought(2017) Oprea, AlexandraMy contention in this dissertation is that the history of liberal political thought contains two incompatible models of children's political status, which in turn produce two incompatible answers to the question "Is liberalism compatible with civic education?" The first model, which I describe as "the apolitical child", emerges out of the social contract tradition in liberal political thought dominant during the 17th and 18th centuries. This radical departure from previous conceptions of children's place within political communities served to weaken the authority of absolutist monarchs over subjects born within their territories. In making political obligations voluntary, this tradition justified either exclusive parental authority over children's education or a program of education concerned with preserving children's capacity to voluntarily choose their political obligations upon coming of age. The second model, which I describe as "the child as citizen", develops out of a later liberal tradition concerned with preserving then existing liberal regimes against the growing threats of illiberal populism, religious fanaticism and political violence. As the political power of the working classes grew during the 19th century, the risk of public support for illiberal policies became increasingly salient to liberal political thinkers. In abandoning consent as the ground of political obligations, these liberals also abandoned the model of the apolitical child. Instead, they saw children as citizens whose attachment to liberal political institutions would be decisive in whether those liberal institutions would survive.
Item Open Access Risky Business: The Economy of Self-Management in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction(2020) Carozza, Davide GuidoThis study argues that in the eighteenth century a discourse of risk management emerged that fundamentally reshaped the relation of man to the world by imagining that the individual was capable of controlling aspects of life that had hitherto been left to God or fate. This shift, moreover, established one of the defining characteristics of modernity, linking individual autonomy to the process of managing risk in a manner that not only remains with us today, but has been so thoroughly naturalized that we are no longer aware of how it shapes everyday life. When eighteenth-century fiction and philosophy first began to link selfhood to the ability to manage risk, the dangers an individual faced were all potentially lethal threats to the body: shipwreck, cannibalism, plague, kidnapping, rape. As the notion of individuality as a reflexive defense against the dangers of the world came to be better established, the nature of these threats changed. Rather than dangers to the body, social risks became the focus of authors I call risk theorists. Individual autonomy now meant policing the boundaries of a particular representation of oneself in society. This new formation of selfhood at first depended on a powerful anxiety about avoiding the emotional influence of others, but as this risk too came to seem manageable external threats melted away. What was left were the psychological operations of an individual forced to read social cues, knowing that failure to do so meant inviting the condemnation of others. The greatest risk to an individual now came from their own mind when they failed to discover and perform the right social procedures.
The study begins by focusing on the intermixed physical and economic risks that shape the works of Daniel Defoe, who established the need for a modern individual to circulate in a dangerous world in order to secure for himself better standing in society. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) Defoe explicitly rejects the notion that one should take the safest path in life, forcing his protagonists to move through a world they know to be dangerous even when that choice seems superficially unreasonable. Samuel Richardson then translated these intermingled risks into sexual terms in Clarissa (1748), telling the story of a woman who knows that defending herself against a rapist means risking financial destitution. Rather than choose her virtue or her livelihood she charts a third course, valuing her sense of self over the safety of her body and dying in order to ensure that she controls how her story is told.
In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, periodical writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele began the process of rendering risk in social terms by establishing a discourse of taste which Adam Smith takes up in both his moral philosophy and economic writings. Smith sees the logic of good taste through to its natural conclusion in A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) when he defines the modern individual through his ability to seal himself off from the poor judgment and excessive emotions of others. Smith then brings the moderation and reserve of the individual to an economic and thus global scale in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Finally, Jane Austen completes the internalization of risk management in Emma (1815), where the ability to confront the dangers of the world is rendered in fully psychological terms. Emma’s evolution as a risk manager depends not on her capacity to seal herself from the outside world, but on her ability to correctly read the intentions and desires of others and judge whether and how they can be compatible with her own.