Browsing by Subject "Liberalism"

My 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.

There is a widespread belief among scholars that liberalism and republicanism are two alternative traditions, that the ideal of liberty for individuals to freely order their own lives and ideal of liberty for political communities to govern themselves developed in tension with each other. The deeply influential historical account that undergirds this view has provided reasons for believing that the two ideals are not only historical rivals, but conceptually incompatible—and that reconciliation between the two is always synthetic and a matter of compromise.

I challenge this account by arguing that both of these traditions derive from Cicero and that they can be reconciled on a Ciceronian foundation. I argue that Cicero—not Machiavelli—ought to be considered the central figure in the republican tradition and classical source for liberalism as well. I show that Cicero offers a theory of politics according to which republican self-government and the freedom and security of individuals are inextricably linked and mutually reinforcing. In other words, Cicero articulates a vision the blends that liberal and republican ideals of freedom into one coherent whole. I then illustrate how this ideal lies at the core of John Locke’s early articulation of natural rights. And finally, I demonstrate that the American Founding constitutes the culmination of this Ciceronian tradition of liberal republicanism.

What is consent? What does it mean, what is its use, and what good does it do? My dissertation turns these questions over and over, looking at the answers given by three different eras of western history: the Information Age up to the present, the Enlightenment up to the birth of the United States, and the Middle Ages up to the Reformation. The structure of my thought reverses the chronology of history, because I imagine my project as an excavation. Starting with a survey of the present landscape, I work downward to the depth of the past, recovering a form of consent buried in a language we have lost. Always conscious of our present context, my technique is what some call “metamodern,” meaning I freely adopt a posture that is, at turns, postmodern and premodern. After discussing the scope and method of my work in chapter one, I devote the second chapter to a study of our databased economy. Tech firms are extracting biometric and behavioral data, setting up asymmetrical power relations with a small but all-important choice architecture, the Agree button. I offer a survey of the logics behind its automation. The third chapter then picks up where the second leaves off. I draw from my own experience working in clinical research, where it was my job to “consent people.” The strange grammar of that phrase prompts a discussion about the history and practice of informed consent. This leads to the fourth chapter, where I turn to John Locke’s theory of the social contract. From Locke, we receive the basic principles regulating our use of consent today. But as I show in the next chapter, a very different paradigm lies beneath it, which is what I want to recover. Chapter five thus traces the evolutions of "consentire" from Aquinas to Luther, giving careful attention to language they received from Augustine. The sixth and final chapter then explores the Augustinian grammar in the visionary work of Dante and Catherine of Siena, whom I believe can teach us another way to be modern.

Since its founding in 1993, Taiwan’s Life Conservationist Association (LCA) advocates for laws supporting the “equality of life” as an alternative to “human equality.” According to European Enlightenment liberalism, “human equality” stems from the distinctly human capacity for rationality endowed by a creator, a reflection of a three-part ontology that separates humans from their creator and from the rest of creation. As this dissertation demonstrates, liberal humanism reproduces this three-part ontology as the distinctly separate domains of the religious, the (human) secular, and the natural. In contrast, Shih Chao-hwei, the Taiwanese Buddhist nun who co-founded LCA, asserts the equality of life stems from the capacity of all sentient beings to suffer. She rejects the entire Christian liberal cosmology, denying the existence of any eternal creator and only recognizing a distinction between sentient and insentient beings.

Based on a total of two years of multi-species ethnographic field work conducted from 2015 to 2018, this study examines how LCA and its allies promote the equality of life as an alternative to human equality in Taiwan. The study responds to (1) recent post-colonial scholarship that demonstrates how colonial powers used the institutions of religious freedom and the separation of church and state to subjugate non-Christian teachings and (2) recent scholarship in political ecology that demonstrates how concepts of nature and naturalism denied alternative ontologies of life. In response to these critiques, I put Han teachings such as Buddhism on equal terms with sciences such as conservation biology, as well as the traditional knowledge of the indigenous minorities who have largely converted to Christianity.

As an ethnographic example of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, I examine how the Tayal people are responding to a conservation law drafted by LCA as part of the colonial policies of the liberal state. The Tayal contend that unlike the Buddhist method of protecting life which prohibits killing, the method of protecting life in their own traditional law called Gaga is expressed through hunting. They resist both liberal policies that denied indigenous people’s full human equality and restrictive hunting policies based on LCA’s Buddhism-inspired equality of life. Yet, the Tayal also ally themselves with Christian churches and the global indigenous rights movement so that their arguments to restore Gaga are expressed in terms of the liberal institutions of human rights. The central argument of the dissertation is that, to resolve political disputes over the equality of life, Buddhists and indigenous peoples are both forced to appeal to and reinforce institutions based on human equality, institutions by which both were suppressed. Rather than accepting liberal narratives that frame questions of ecology in terms of competing human rights, this dissertation invites scholars to recognize liberalism as a product of Christian theology and to consider alternative notions of the ontology of life not simply as religions or forms of traditional ecological knowledge, but as contested but viable legal alternatives to liberalism.

This project addresses how democratic regimes founded on ideals of individual agency and personal freedom systematically disadvantage groups and persons. I argue that (neo-)liberalism enacts this inequity not incidentally, but by design, creating an illusion of free choice and consensual contract while actively obscuring the coercive mechanisms that sustain inequality. As the era in which contractual agency was consolidated into a national political program, the Victorian period produced a plethora of legal and literary justifications for the injustices sanctioned by English liberalism. I aim to reveal the contradictions internal to these justifications, while also disclosing methodologies of resistance. Today, we remain Victorian in our reliance on a model of individual consent to rationalize our political system; my interest in Victorian novels lies in their ability to reimagine and critique the political conditions that we take for granted today.

"Fictions of Consent" starts with a puzzle: there are certain kinds of criminal behavior—murder, sexual deviance, cannibalism—that are exceptional rather than typical, yet nevertheless generated enormous concern in Victorian jurisprudence and popular culture. I contend that nineteenth-century law and literature seem to have allocated undue attention to exceptional crimes not because of their sensationalism per se—not because they’re extraordinary—but because they’re actually dangerously ordinary. There are behaviors, I argue, that the law is invested in expelling as criminal, but that the novel can help us see as contractual. When novelists translated outlandish criminal behavior into rational attempts of modern subjects to negotiate consensual relationships with one another, they transformed these ostensible anomalies into the predictable culmination of a liberal social order: these crimes now became part and parcel of a society based on freedom of contract. Novelists including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mona Caird, and Thomas Hardy suggest that the violent coercion apparently unique to the extreme situation in fact represents the ordinary logic of liberalism.

How did Georges Sorel's philosophy of violence emerge from the moderate, reformist, and liberal philosophy of the French Third Republic? This dissertation answers the question through a contextual intellectual history of Sorel's writings from the 1880s until 1908. Drawing on a variety of archives and printed sources, this dissertation situates Sorel in terms of the intellectual field of the early Third Republic. I locate the roots of Sorel's problematic at once in a broadly European late 19th century philosophy of science and in the liberal values and the political culture of the French 1870s. Sorel's engagement with Karl Marx, but also Émile Durkheim, Giambattista Vico, and other social theorists, is traced in order to explain why, despite his Marxism, Sorel confronted the twin fin-de-siècle crises of the Dreyfus Affair and Revisionism as a political liberal. I show how his syndicalism became radical, scissionistic, and anti-Statist in the post-Dreyfus context of anticlericalism leading up to the separation of Church and State in 1905. Sorel drew on figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedetto Croce to elaborate his Reflections on Violence in 1906-1908, finally transforming his political theory of institutions into an ethics of myth and individual engagement.

Sorel has been best known as an icon of radicalism as such--in shorthand, an inspiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. This political polarization has occluded Sorel's profound engagement with the foundational thinkers of the Third Republic. Against the backdrop of a systematic misunderstanding of the philosophical issues at stake, Sorel's political ideas and interventions have also been misunderstood. Not only his insights about the limits and potentials of the intellectual framework of the French Third Republic, but also their most significant contemporary resonances, have been lost. I show how and why this has been so by studying the reception of Sorel's work in the Anglophone world from the immediate postwar years until the early 1970s. Finally, I investigate resonances between Sorel's work as I have reconstructed it, and some currents in contemporary post-Marxist political thought.

Sorel is a revelatory figure in the entangled history of late 19th century liberalism and republicanism. He was profoundly engaged in the intellectual life of the French Third Republic and this, as much as his Marxism although less overtly, has shaped the meaning of his work. To return him to this context gives us a new understanding of the stakes of the philosophy of the period and the limits of its liberalism.

This dissertation argues that the American conception of individuality underwent a significant cultural and intellectual revision between the 1870s and 1910s, which laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the neoliberal individual. Where the individual of liberalism was primarily characterized by Property ownership, the last few decades of the 1800s witnessed an increase in efforts to tie individuality to choice-making. The narrative that began to gain prominence in the 1870s was the story of an individual carefully assessing its desires and, through its choices, directly expressing these wishes to the world. This association between choice and the individual did not mean that Property ceased to matter as a category; rather, Property became so fundamental an assumption that its origins––at least to some parts of the population––ceased to require an explanation.I trace this shift from property-owning to choice-making individuality through the two genres of writing that, since the advent of modernity, have consistently articulated what it means to be the subject of capitalism: economics and the novel. Neoclassical economics famously introduced the rational, utility-maximizing individual to the discipline in the 1870s, which would come to be a highly influential narrative in the quantitative social sciences of the twentieth century. As Chapter One shows, this development in economics was paralleled by an increase in novelistic depictions of self-interested decision making as ethical, which constitutes a marked departure from the sentimental logic of earlier nineteenth-century literature. This narrative did not go unchallenged, however: Economists and novelists from Thorstein Veblen to W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out that choice-making individuality is only a believable narrative for those who fit the White middle-class mold. As I show in Chapter Two, “The Conditioned Individual,” novelists like Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton, as well as Veblen and the institutional economists he inspired, depicted social milieu is the primary determinant of tastes and desires. As such, they argued, what one ostensibly wants does not amount to an authentic expression of self. Du Bois and his fellow African American novelists, we see in Chapter Three, mount an even more fundamental critique: the Property presupposed by the choice-making individual, they demonstrate, relies on a long-standing practice of expropriating a racial Other. Along with Pauline Hopkins and Sutton Griggs, Du Bois shows that sharecropping and Jim Crow legislation established a social order in which Black self-ownership remained tenuous, thus reinforcing a dividing line crucial to White identity, namely the one between the Propertied and the Unpropertied. Hopkins’s, Griggs’s, and Du Bois’s insistence on the importance of Property in the White imaginary suggests that at least one reason for the rising popularity of the choice narrative in the late nineteenth century was that it served to conceal the deep reliance of Whiteness on Property and its racial Other––a project particularly urgent in the wake of the abolition of slavery.

This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print—the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production—across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post-colonial economy.

Historians of Mexico have typically approached print as a vehicle for texts written by elites, which they argue contributed to the development of a national public sphere or print culture in spite of low literacy levels. By shifting the focus to print’s production, my work instead reveals that a range of urban residents—from prominent printshop owners to government ministers to street vendors—produced, engaged, and deployed printed items in contests unfolding in the urban environment. As print increasingly functioned as a political weapon in the decades after independence, print production itself became an arena in struggles over the emerging contours of politics and state formation, even as printing technologies remained relatively unchanged over time.

This work examines previously unexplored archival documents, including official correspondence, legal cases, business transactions, and printshop labor records, to shed new light on Mexico City printers’ interactions with the emerging national government, and reveal the degree to which heated ideological debates emerged intertwined with the most basic concerns over the tangible practices of print. By delving into the rich social and cultural world of printing—described by intellectuals and workers alike in memoirs, fiction, caricatures and periodicals— it also considers how printers’ particular status straddling elite and working worlds led them to challenge boundaries drawn by elites that separated manual and intellectual labors. Finally, this study engages the full range of printed documents made in Mexico City printshops not just as texts but also as objects with particular visual and material qualities whose uses and meanings were shaped not only by emergent republicanism but also by powerful colonial legacies that generated ambivalent attitudes towards print’s transformative power.

This project traces the seemingly improbable intersections between performances of blackness and the development and traces of an American liberalism defined by Gunnar Myrdal's overwhelmingly influential, sociological text, An American Dilemma. I argue that when Myrdal determined in his 1944 study on the "Negro problem" that the messy inconsistencies between how the United States articulated its laudable egalitarianism and the violent histories of oppression defining the lives of African Americans was a matter resting in the "hearts and minds of white America" rather than entrenched structural inequalities, he enabled a radicalized version of sentimentality that would structure how liberalism attempted to rectify this racial paradox right into the 21st century - to walk in someone else's skin rather than their shoes. While American liberalism is a notoriously contested and slippery set of ideologies, the texts I study provide a performative logic of American liberalism that deconstructs and historicizes its own ideological impulses around notions of racial difference.

The project situates the discursive legacies of Myrdal's study alongside a series of spectacularized narratives of what I call "racial im/posture" - adventures in racial impersonation authorized by American liberalism and reliant on the logics of both blackface minstrelsy and racial passing. I consider these narratives of racial im/posture in the literary genres of memoir, autobiography, fiction, and speculative fiction, along with the legal brief, the film, and the photograph. Although I read these seemingly disparate texts from my own epistemological disciplining of literary studies, the methodology employed here is an interdisciplinary one indebted to performance and visual studies, race and queer theory, as well as new Southern studies. The project intervenes in the conventional thinking around racial masquerade by reframing the temporality of what has largely been considered an issue of the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as by considering these texts through the anxieties, ironies, and contentions of the discursive legacies of American liberalism. In five chapters that satellite around the ideological apparatuses of our sociopolitical and cultural landscape including social and literary fictions, the law, and transnational capital, I think through issues of authenticity, belonging, community, appropriation, and performance.

Moving beyond traditional conceptions of suicide in Romantic literature as indices of Romanticism's fascination with tragic or mad genius, this dissertation traces how Romantic-era writers also employed the trope of suicide as a political tool to argue for the rationality of individuals without rights, or with limited rights, such as slaves, women, and the poor. In both scholarly and post-Romantic artistic engagements with so-called Romantic suicide, suicide is typically interpreted as neither a critique of an unlivable society, nor even a mark of mental illness, but instead operates as a meta-critique of art itself, suggesting that the artist, by virtue of his creativity, is somehow beyond this world. But by showing how suicide also emerged, in the Romantic period, as a metaphor for challenging social structures associated with liberal individualism, Suicidal Romanticism posits that the emphasis on the link between creative and suicidal proclivities associated with Romanticism, which persists even in our contemporary imagination in spite of social scientific arguments to the contrary, troubles our capacity to talk either about the problem of mental illness or about the social injustices that would drive somebody to want not to live. The Romantic writers examined here--including Thomas Day and John Bicknell, Mary and Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth--proposed an alternative conception of suicide, positing the need to open the social field to recognize all those who are considered "non-subjects." By using suicide as a metaphor to interrogate the roots of inequality within a social structure based on exclusive individualism, these writers suggest that acts of suicide represent responses not only to private phenomena, but also to social conditions, and that the two are not mutually exclusive. By thus reading Romantic-era discourses of suicide as radical interrogations of liberalism, Suicidal Romanticism also positions Romanticism itself as a response to political questions that first emerged in abolitionist and women's rights discourses of the long eighteenth century.

“The Complete Bentham: Rationality’s Afterlife in Victorian Literature,” focuses on one of the nineteenth century’s most contentious attempts to imagine the social good in quantitative terms: Jeremy Bentham’s proposal to measure and manage “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” The last time literary studies took Bentham seriously, the guiding assumption was that his Panopticon prison trained individuals in the routines of self-policing that liberal government required, and that the novel carried that disciplinary training to the reading public. I show that this argument considers only a small part of Bentham’s massive corpus and so misses both the radical reformulation of liberal government that he was proposing and the aesthetic possibilities that his utilitarianism opened up as a result. The Victorians certainly thought there was something caustic in Bentham’s system of cost-benefit analysis, a worry expressed in charges that Bentham was an emotionally deficient thinker who would, like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind, “weigh and measure any parcel of human nature and tell you what it comes to.” This critique, I argue, has its basis in the Victorian recognition that Bentham’s logic challenges liberalism’s normative commitments including the individual’s right to own property and the primacy of the family as the fundamental unit of society. When Bentham asserts that the only way to manage a population of rational individuals is to maximize pleasures and minimize pains, no matter their source, he imagined a form of cost-benefit analysis that makes any particular right or social norm expendable in the name of producing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Rather than show how the novel appropriates Bentham’s panoptic apparatus to reinforce the norms of liberal society, I argue that Bentham’s excessive reason is the means by which nineteenth-century literature found its way outside those norms. When Victorian novelists join liberal thinkers in chastising Bentham for translating qualities of life into quantities of pleasure and pain, they also memorably preserve the perverse implications of utilitarian rationalism and imagine new qualities of life. Even so obvious a caricature of Bentham as Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind offers a vision of a life passionately animated by the compulsion to calculate.

In order to see what became of utilitarianism’s calculating rationality in the Victorian cultural imagination, each chapter of my dissertation considers how a different novelist takes up one aspect of Bentham’s multi-faceted theory in order to contemplate its radical consequences. My first chapter, “Calculating Pleasure,” begins with Bentham’s assumption that individuals who imagine future pleasures and pains can be governed by means of a carefully calibrated threat of future punishment. Shelley’s Frankenstein takes up this calculating logic in order to reverse it: the more Victor and his creature imagine their futures, the more ungovernable they become as their disappointment and hope lead them to increasingly antisocial behaviors. In my second chapter, “Expanding Bureaucracy,” I show how Dickens enacts a different reversal when considering the universal suspicion that motivates Bentham’s plans for a universal bureaucracy. While Bentham, ever distrustful of government functionaries, insists on layering one level of government inspectors on top of another until the whole population is involved in monitoring bureaucratic institutions, Dickens’s late city novels (no less suspicions of government functionaries) see these bonds of mutual surveillance as the basis for forming bonds of trust and mutual aid. My third chapter, “Panoptic Economics,” returns to Bentham’s famous Panopticon prison in order to argue that even as it establishes the protocols for disciplining individuals it also imagines an alternative socialist economy that would care for and manage all unemployed people. While Wilkie Collins’s detective fiction has often been read in terms of totalizing panoptic surveillance, a revised understanding of the Panopticon allows us to see that these novels also imagine a utopian condition of full employment where everyone becomes the possessor of potentially valuable information no one can be dismissed as part of a disposable surplus population. My final chapter, “Sexual Irregularities,” considers the queer potential of Bentham’s utilitarianism. I show that Bentham’s little-known defense of homosexual, bestial, and necrophilic acts joins the aestheticism of Walter Pater in promoting pleasures that belong, not to the reproductive future of the bourgeois family, but rather “give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” Taken as a whole, my dissertation offers us a way of seeing the word “utilitarian” as something other than the catch-all term of derision for a practical, depoliticized, and unaesthetic education that sometimes appears in op-eds bemoaning the “Death of the Humanities.” By returning to Bentham’s contentious place in the Victorian cultural imagination I hope to show just how impractical, political, and aesthetic utilitarianism can be.

This dissertation identifies a logic of “equal agency” at the heart of a great deal of contemporary thinking about politics. Scholars and citizens alike, I claim, often use some version of this logic in trying to understand what is valuable about liberal and democratic institutions. As a way of thinking democratically at the highest level, however—as a comprehensive principle for organizing our various practical and theoretical commitments, understanding the nature and value of democracy, and orienting ourselves towards a democratic future—I believe that it is deeply flawed. This dissertation demonstrates why such an alternative is needed, and proceeds to articulate one: the dispersion of power.

The introduction lays out the scope and methods before giving a chapter outline and a summary of the dissertation’s contributions. Chapter one gives an account of the logic of equal agency, demonstrating its pervasiveness in political theory and its reliance on an ideal of individual subjectivity. Chapter two employs contemporary biology and cognitive science to support Foucault’s critique of subjectivity, and chapter three demonstrates that this should lead us to abandon the logic of equal agency more generally. Chapter four articulates conceptions of agency and power that are compatible with Foucault’s critique, and chapter five demonstrates how we might “think democratically” using these concepts within a logic of dispersing power. Chapter six links a crisis in contemporary democratic theory to the logic of equal agency and suggests that the dispersion of power can help to resolve it; a promise that is followed up in chapter seven. Chapter eight concludes by employing the logic of dispersing power to advocate for a universal basic income.