The conception of human nature in modern political thought : with special reference to the work of Charles Taylor

[From the introduction:]This thesis will analyse and advocate a 'contextualist' reading of human nature. By reference to the work of Charles Taylor it will be argued that Modern conceptions of human nature are (to echo Nietzsche) 'dead'. This is to attack the suggestion that a conception of human nature may be understood in an ahistorical, universalist, abstract or 'unencumbered' sense. A conception of human nature must, of necessity, it will be argued, be understood in a more dynamic and 'local' sense. It is the suggestion of this thesis that human nature must be understood in a sense akin to the existential notion of 'facticity', or as possessing a degree of 'determinacy'. While human nature is 'encumbered' by its 'situation' in time and geographical location it is not however wholly determined. An individual's existence is co-determined by individual choice, the individual's history, and by Nature. Human nature must be recognised to have a facticity, to exist at a certain point in history, in a certain country, to be encumbered by countless other emotional ties, friendships, and loyalties. This 'embedded' conception of human nature is delineated and explored through Taylor's conception of human nature as an 'interspatial epiphany', and is to be preferred to the unencumbered sense of interspatial epiphany that might be seen to be offered by some forms of existentialism. Such existentialist thought is not as astutely located or embedded as Taylor's thought, and suffers from what Taylor terms 'existential heroism', a focus on choice making rather than on the background of encumberment.While the notion of a universal conception of human nature must be abandoned, as the individual is now seen as 'located' temporally, and spatially, it is still possible to draw some (very) modest generalisations about the nature of individuals. This exploration proceeds by generating a 'thick description' of the selfs particular, but ultimately contingent, connections and affiliations. (Such a located description is seen as superior by Taylor, to thin, mechanistic, scientific and neurological descriptions of human agency.

The wedding ceremony - secularisation of the christian tradition

This thesis investigates and analyses the wedding ceremony in western society. The white wedding ceremony developed within Christian religious doctrine and although charged with certain symbolic meanings and traditions has not remained static but has evolved and changed to reflect contemporary lifestyles. The wedding ceremony has always been an indicator of ideals and aspirations at every social level and this work focuses on the sublime ceremonial as well as the evolving nature of marriage. Couples historically married to cement dynasties and to ensure passage of lands and wealth and their marriages were arranged but once couples could marry partners of their choice and love liaisons became normal then the ceremony provided an ideal opportunity for festive exhibition and theatrical excess. Wedding pageantry has readily adapted to encompass recent celebrity culture that has pervaded modern societies. Modern craving for instant acclaim has been promoted by profiteering industries and businesses dedicated to providing the dream wedding within any budget. This thesis argues that the nature of marriage has changed from a life-long heterosexual legal committment to one person to a relationship that anticipates some degree of separateness and autonomy within a heterosexual or same sex association. The ceremony itself has evolved to accommodate changing ideals and expectations of first marriages and to provide opportunity for couples to remarry within the dictates of contemporary fashion. The wedding ceremony remains a significant and symbolic occassion because it has adapted and changed to accommodate contemporary tastes, styles, standards and edicts and because of this it will survive

Fashioning Women Under Totalitarian Regimes: New Women of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia

My dissertation seeks to expand our knowledge of Russian and German women\u27s history under totalitarian systems by comparing women\u27s fashioning by the state and their self-fashioning in Germany and Russia during the Third Reich and Bolshevik and Stalinist rule respectively. I argue that processes of women\u27s fashioning and self-fashioning were largely influenced by the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on the so-called Woman Question and the New Woman and were culturally specific. I map the evolution of the Woman Question and the New Woman in the decades directly preceding and following the Nazi and Bolshevik seizure of power, defining changing standards of femininity and prevalent emancipatory paradigms. My dissertation analyzes the complex interaction of women and the dictators, focusing on state organizations for women, policies, official propaganda, and mass literature and culture

Capital at the Brink: Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism

Capital at the Brink reveals the pervasiveness, destructiveness, and dominance of neoliberalism within American society and culture. The contributors to this collection also offer points of resistance to an ideology wherein, to borrow Henry Giroux’s comment, “everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit.” The first step in fighting neoliberalism is to make it visible. By discussing various inroads that it has made into political, popular, and literary culture, Capital at the Brink is taking this first step and joining a global resistance that works against neoliberalism by revealing the variety of ways in which it dominates and destroys various dimensions of our social and cultural life. With essays by Paul A. Passavant, Noah De Lissovoy, Robert P. Marzec, Jennifer Wingard, Zahi Zalloua, Jodi Dean, Andrew Baerg, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Christopher Breu and Uppinder Mehan

Reconstructing Home: Abolition Democracy, the City, and Black Feminist Political Thought Revisited

This study extends W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of abolition democracy by exploring the political thought of Black women in and around the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between 1850 and 1880. As the historical site of the nation’s founding, the U.S. abolitionist movement, and the largest concentration of Blacks in the United States at the end of the 19th century, Philadelphia is central to the American democratic imaginary, yet Black women’s contributions to the city, the nation, and that imaginary, even by those exploring black political thought, remain largely unexplored. By returning to how Sarah Mapps Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Gertrude Bustill Mossell negotiated and transgressed the newly drawn boundaries of the expanding city, the “splendid failure of Reconstruction” that Du Bois documented in Black Reconstruction takes on gendered and urban dimensions. Attending to these Black women as they adapted to global trends of enclosure, industrialization, and urbanization, I find that the political concept of fugitivity that spurned the democratic movement for the abolition of slavery retains theoretical significance beyond the antebellum period. Having a history in Black political thought, fugitivity is a paradigm through which people in their everyday practices escape the capitalist impulse to confine, detain, and commodify their existence as both capital and labor. Black women as political thinkers complicate the spatialized reality and romantic idea of “home” that underpinned both the hunting and freeing of fugitives in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War. Their work raises the following question: what does democracy mean when the nation is built from and by those deemed “homeless”

British Conceptions of Wealth and Property in the East Indies and their Influence on Governance and Society: 1807-1824

The British East India Company's invasion of Java in 1811 is regarded by historians to have paved the way for the Company's founding of a free port in Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819. Raffles's references to Adam Smith's 1776 treatise, The Wealth of Nations, in his 1817 History of Java have reinforced the view that he had adopted Smith's liberal principles of political economy when he was governor of Java from 1811 to 1816. A closer inspection, however, shows Raffles's policies to have instead protected monopolies, restricted markets, and regulated people's lives. From this contradiction had arisen the historical problem of how the two events of Java's invasion and Singapore's founding were connected. Historians maintain that, though later inspired by free trade, Raffles was initially bound to the mercantilist interests of the Company. Yet the Company's Governor-General, the Earl of Minto, had in Java introduced some of the first emancipatory laws and civil reforms of the modern era. What were the British really doing in the East Indies between 1811 and 1819? In this thesis, I answer this question by showing that these contradictions had arisen from the historian's assumption that ideological relations had determined Raffles's and Minto's policies. I show instead that the linguistic contexts of those policies, when examined, reveal not contradiction but a general criticism of both 'liberalism' and 'mercantilism'. Raffles, Minto, and the third actor in this study, John Leyden, had held moral and political views which were sceptical of political economy's claims to deliver productivity and surplus. While virtue and the ideal of freedom had brought material progress, they were believed to have also led to vice, slavery, and human decline. This conception of the human condition identifies a civic humanist discourse and a common sense philosophy that were prominent in eighteenth-century Britain. They influenced an ethical approach to empire that was radically opposed to both Franco-Dutch and British colonialism. In the East Indies, Raffles, Minto, and Leyden resolved to end the power of a moneyed interest over the native population and restore the native individual's self-consciousness and self-dependence. These events defined a 'venture of critique' which saw the Company effectively decolonise Napoleonic Java and lay the foundations for a native commonwealth that encompassed the Malay Archipelago and which was centred at Singapore. They articulate an historical moment when the established narrative of modern empire is interrupted by a narrative of the classical republic. Such a moment entirely overturns the conventional understanding of the historical relation between Britain and the Malay States. By introducing humanist conceptions of wealth and property into the colonial and oriental discourse, it changed existing forms of society and governance in the East Indies and profoundly determined future forms of society and governance in nineteenth-century British Malaya and twentieth-century Malaysia and Singapore

Gender-Competent Legal Education

Male-dominated law and legal knowledge essentially characterized the whole of pre-modern history in that the patriarchy represented the axis of social relations in both the private and public spheres. Indeed, modern and even contemporary law still have embedded elements of patriarchal heritage, even in the secular modern legal systems of Western developed countries, either within the content of legislation or in terms of its implementation and interpretation. This is true to a greater or lesser extent across legal systems, although the secular modern legal systems of the Western developed countries have made great advances in terms of gender equality. The traditional understanding of law has always been self-evidently dominated by men, but modern law and its understanding have also been more or less “malestreamed.” Therefore, it has become necessary to overcome the given “maskulinity” of legal thought. In contemporary legal and political orders, gender mainstreaming of law has been of the utmost importance for overcoming deeply and persistently embedded power relations and gender-based, unequal social relations. At the same time and equally importantly, the gender mainstreaming of legal education – to which this book aims to contribute – can help to gradually eliminate this male dominance and accompanying power relations from legal education and higher education as a whole. This open access textbook provides an overview of gender issues in all areas of law, including sociological, historical and methodological issues. Written for students and teachers around the globe, it is intended to provide both a general overview and in-depth knowledge in the individual areas of law. Relevant court decisions and case studies are supplied throughout the book

Twilight of the American State

The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian. How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today. Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit