How does the book-object in early modernity participate in the representation of scientific knowledge? How was the reader meant to approach the book and to comprehend its contents? This project starts from the contention that scientific knowledge is not a product simply to be deposited into unmarked containers and transmitted unproblematically. On the contrary, the book, whether literary or scientific, actively shapes and invents objects of scientific knowledge. Sensory, affective and cognitive ways in which the reader is expected to approach the book and its contents are implicit in its formatting of text and image, not to mention margins, presentational material and indices. This project draws from literary and natural scientific traditions of the French and Italian Renaissance in order to study how the early-modern book forms and performs scientific knowledge in various ways. Compelling the reader to interrupt his or her reading and to explore the book’s text and images as if they were objects in their own right, the book-object strives to imitate the experience and method of scientific discovery for the early-modern reader. To this end, touch, appetition, and bodily awareness become as important as sight and critical reasoning in a procedural approach and apprehension of knowledge in and of the book-object. An “aesthetics of discovery”, formed by the book and performed by the reader, is implicit in the book’s careful articulations of text and image. / Romance Languages and Literatures

The scientific discoveries and inventions of the early seventeenth century, which include Johannes Kepler’s inverted retinal image, the refinement of lenses, and the invention of the telescope, transformed the status of vision in the acquisition of knowledge, thus modifying the nature of what is known and even challenging how things are known. Rather than focus on philosophical oppositions between seeing and looking, or on artistic practices such as linear perspective or anamorphosis in literature’s engagement with vision, this study privileges instead a dialogue with early modern optics. Deriving a theoretical framework from the scientific debates about vision and its instruments, which brings attention to the historically charged concepts of mediated perception, the visible and the invisible, and natural and mechanical sight, I examine how French and Italian authors in the early seventeenth century engaged with ocular and optical motifs to question the sense of sight and its authority. My corpus describes vision as indispensable to the observation and knowledge of the world, although the texts also expose the vulnerability of the sense of sight to error because of natural limitations or an inability to recognize the true form behind deceitful appearances. As such, they elucidate a crisis of knowledge and representation that characterizes the earlier decades of the seventeenth century. Based on the dynamics between the eye and visual aids as they appear in the scientific community, I identify two distinct visual modes in the literary texts, which correspond to the natural eye and the instrumentalized one, assisted and enhanced by a lens. The authors considered here, which include Béroalde de Verville, Traiano Boccalini, Agrippa d’Aubigné, and the writers involved in the polemics around Giambattista Marino’s L’Adone and Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, present the two visual modes as existing in tension, which I define as “baroque vision.” The analyses of the literary texts demonstrate how the integration of lenses, be it through explicit references to optical devices or through more abstract portrayals that parallel the operations of the eye and the instrument, becomes emblematic of other concerns, from debates regarding discontent about dissimulation to discussions of poetic practice. / Romance Languages and Literatures

<p> Explores the foundations of political community as understood in two complementary ways: first, in contemporary normative political and social theory. Second, in the history of politics and in the history of philosophy. Particular attention is given to David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, as well as their relationship to contemporary political philosophers like Bernard Williams, John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Mills. Using Wittgenstein&rsquo;s concept of a form of life <i>(lebensform) </i> in the <i>Philosophical Investigations,</i> argues that there is a family within the history of political thought whose members share the understanding that a shared form of life, which develops organically and historically, is a necessary condition for a free society to work well. Examines how political and social obligation, trust and commerce, as well as sympathy and concepts of rights, all require interdependence and shared assumptions and expectations. This family balances the impulses of political realism and political idealism, though is somewhat more anti-idealist than pro-realist. Bottom-up thinking that doesn&rsquo;t fall in to the trap of idealism or of rationalism, due to a commitment to epistemological limits and the recognition of our finite capacities. In particular, I am interested in how we can combine the seemingly competing forces of culture and tradition (ways we have been doing things, one might say) with the necessary desire for change, reform, and progress. My approach to these questions can help shape the way we think about the size of states, if and when foreign intervention makes sense, the pace of change, and the necessary variety of political and social orders suited to a varying world.</p><p>

Abstract not available.

This account of Canada's early research and telecommunications satellite programs provides insight into the evolution of Canada's advanced technology capacity, viewed by most as essential to a country's well-being. It synthesizes developments in several fields including federal government science and industrial policies, and Canada-U.S. relations. It also reveals the unintended impacts of nationalism. Through source materials including Royal Commission reports, position papers, and internal memoranda, this study attempts to recreate the policy consciousness that pervaded the federal government from the late 1950's into the early 1970's to expose and understand the motivations that led Canada to enter the space age and to become the first country in the world to have its own domestic telecommunications satellite. Like consciousness itself, the development of Canada's early satellite program was based on the blending of experience and perception. The success of the first Alouette led to the extended International Satellites for Ionospheric Studies (ISIS) research satellite program, while prevailing perceptions about the need to bolster Canada's science and technology base as well as concerns about American cultural and economic dominance guided policy makers to invest in a domestic telecommunications satellite in the late 1960's. The consciousness that affected Canadian policy and opinion makers oscillated between a defensive and an expansionary nationalism. Despite nearly a century of nationhood, the Canadian mentality of the 1960's unfairly compared itself with the leading Anglo metropoles of Great Britain and the United States, which resulted in a self-defeating inferiority complex and anti-colonial outlook. At the same time, Canada, in keeping with the rest of Western culture, was affected by an imperial drive that impelled politicians and government officials to seek ways to ensure that the country expanded and developed. In the early part of the decade, this drive began to focus on science and technology as the keys to prosperity. Canadian policy makers quickly adopted this stance, but their prescriptions were based on misleading analyses that the country's research and development (R&D) greatly lagged behind other industrial nations. Social critics and government insiders leapt to the mistaken conclusion that the blame for this perceived underdevelopment lay with the pattern of American foreign ownership in the Canadian economy. Policy and opinion leaders' ready acceptance of the "branch plant" explanation regarding what they believed were weaknesses in Canada's R&D base, despite credible evidence to the contrary, indicated their tendency to place perception ahead of analysis to the detriment of sound decision making and planning. Thus, the paradox of economic nationalism was that it weakened Canadian initiative rather than strengthened it, as was the purported intent.

This dissertation studies the emergence of a Keynesian political-economic strategy in America during the interwar period. It is concerned primarily with one crucial aspect of this process: the ideological role played by key political, economic, and managerial elites in the emergence of such strategy. It thus traces the political discourse articulated by the Taylor Society, the institutional home of scientific management, from its inception as an industrial research organization to its development as an important policy-making network during the New Deal. It focuses on key figures in the Taylor Society including Morris L. Cooke, Harlow S. Person, Henry Dennison, and Mary Van Kleeck, as well as those who were closely associated with the society, such as Rexford G. Tugwell, Louis D. Brandies, George Soule, Frances Perkins, and Sidney Hillman. The historical narrative shows how during the 1930s the Taylor Society became an important component of the political and economic network that put forward a Keynesian strategy based on the expansion of mass consumption (and thus social purchasing power) via the intervention of the state. This network was critical of the corporatist program, embodied in the National Recovery Administration, in which that state would sanction cartel-like arrangements among capitalists to reduce destructive competition, restrict production, and fix prices. This system of industrial self-regulation entailed minimal state intervention and a reduced role for the unions and the collective bargaining. The Keynesian strategy advanced by the Taylor Society and its allies, on the other hand, advocated an expanded and strong role for the state and unions in the political economy, along with macroeconomic policies that promoted social purchasing power and expanded mass consumption. During the "Second New Deal" the Keynesian elite entered the corridors of power and many of its members took key administrative positions in the welfare state. From these positions they attempted to shape the American political economy.

The purpose of this study is to examine a situated instance of discourse, in this case testimony during the Congressional hearings in Honolulu on Guam commonwealth legislation, and to locate this testimony in the system of commonwealth negotiations. Texts are analyzed for underlying moral orders through multiple readings which tease out moral orientations of care and justice. Additionally, the testimony is examined for central metaphors and the various ways in which the island is imagined as a community. The moral orders are then juxtaposed to display similarities and differences between them. Finally, in identifying some underlying assumptions about conflict, the place of the hearings in the larger context of commonwealth negotiations is examined. Most moral orders represented in the testimony were some combination of care and justice orientations. The moral voice of care most frequently spoke of "pain." Those texts which included a justice orientation made frequent references to "rights." An instance which encapsulates the way in which moral orientations of care and justice are combined in the testimony is found in the visions shared for Guam's new relationship (an aspect of care) with the U.S.: one based on fairness (an aspect of justice). A central metaphor of Guam as adolescent in the American political family surfaced across all categories of moral order. The analysis exposes the great diversity underlying the statements, bringing to the fore deep-rooted differences which account for the seeming interminability of the conflict. This study extends the application of moral order analysis beyond personal narrative into a different form of communication, political testimony. In the secondary analysis for metaphor and imagined communities, connections are made between human development theory and international political relations. The language of family masks the power imbalance in the Guam-U.S. relationship as parental concern. Within the context of commonwealth negotiations, the hearings in Honolulu function to reconstruct a pattern of quiescence in which the people of Guam are persuaded by symbolic means that progress is being made toward defining a new political relationship with the U.S.

This work examines the origins of the Cold War from the perspective of domestic American politics. Specifically, the role of the so-called "Catholic vote" in the New Deal coalition built by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Catholics comprised roughly one-quarter of the population and were concentrated in the major urban and industrial areas of the country. These were the same areas that dominated the electoral college and thus were of primary importance to anyone seeking national office or proposing national policy. FDR frequently modified his position on national issues if it appeared this "Catholic vote" might be jeopardized. Throughout the 1930s, as charges of Communist influence on FDR and the New Deal increased in intensity, the official position of the Catholic Church was hardening into a strict anti-Communism. The potential, then, existed for widespread defections of Catholic voters from the New Deal coalition over the issue of Communism. Using a variety of primary sources but especially the presidential papers located at the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, and the archives of the Archdiocese of Boston in Brighton, Massachusetts, this work will demonstrate the impact of Catholic opinion on national policy, especially foreign policy, as it was reflected in the attempt to keep the Catholic vote in the Democratic Party. The response of first FDR and then Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to Soviet domination of largely Catholic Eastern Europe following the war suggests that religion, especially Catholicism, is the overlooked paradigm of the Cold War.

This is a study of popular political thought and its interaction with the culture of governance in three northern states before the Civil War. By putting matters of governance at the center of antebellum politics, this study differs from reigning society-based interpretations of the era. Drawing upon the polity-centered framework of Theda Skocpol and the broader cultural approach to the political public sphere pioneered by Jurgen Habermas, this dissertation emphasizes how political actors struggled to translate socially conditioned anxieties into political questions that bore fundamental relationship to governance. The story pivots on the rise and fall of the Know Nothing movement, a quintessential expression of nineteenth-century American populism. It argues that the movement's breathtaking fury and appeal flowed from a pervasive sense that governance was lacking in a broad moral purpose; that wire-pulling politicians, blinded by partisan calculation, had allowed dangerous special interests to threaten the public good. Like other populist movements, the Know Nothings framed their agenda with transcendent antiparty calls to eliminate office chasers and special interests from public life. While key differences distinguished the movement regionally, Know Nothings in each state cast the decade's principal issues--slavery, immigration, and economic insecurity--as crises of governance within a radically changing public culture. The decline of the Know Nothings suggests what happens to an antiparty reform movement once it becomes a formal political party. Though Know Nothing lawmakers in each state added a significant corpus of reforms to their prescriptive anti-Catholic agenda, this dissertation stresses the limits of populism--a combination of internal contradictions and cultural constraints that can be termed the third party dialectic. Despite the Know Nothings' rhetoric of patriotic unity, factionalism dogged the movement, while leaders undertook praetorian actions which contradicted the rank and file's antiparty designs. The study concludes by examining how the emergent Republican party established partisan loyalty at the grassroots in the context of sectional polarization. By the eve of the Civil War, the Republicans' antisouthern and herrenvolk appeals incorporated the popular ideal of governance devoted to the public good and the parallel fear of special interests in American public life.

Following the collapse of the insurgencies of the 1880s and 1890s, many former populists and Gilded Age radicals linked up with the region's new industrial workers, farmers, small businessmen and political organizers to fashion a socialism cast in a southern idiom. Armed with this heritage, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) would go on to occupy an important piece of a larger pattern of resistance movements that swept through Dixie between the 1880s and World War I. The SPA, not unlike the People's Party, Farmers' Alliance, Union-Labor, and the Greenbackers, provided something of a panacea for those marginalized either materially or philosophically by the New South creed. This study examines Socialist Party activity in the American South from the 1890s to 1920 and considers how the social, political, and economic character of the region in turn shaped the emergent socialist message. Explored is the formation of socialist politics, particularly through the links between the labor movement, agrarian radicalism, and the party's diverse membership. Played out in the region's manufacturing zones, developing coastlines, and in rural stretches were the tensions of industrialization, civic boosterism, and political disfranchisement as confronted by a vision of an alternative New South, anchored in the remnants of populism and fueled by socialist organizing efforts. In examining the one-party South, disfranchisement, and the poll tax, historians have accounted for the exclusionary and antidemocratic character of institutional politics but have slighted the independent political and cultural movements created by those very dispossessed. Indeed, New South industrialism and social change challenged conventional political relationships. The ballot box included union elections, and the South's power brokers just as often assumed the identity of an industrialist as they did political boss. Located in the union halls and workers, libraries, on city street corners, and in the region's mines, mills, and fields were southern politics of a different variety. By embracing socialism some Southerners created a community of adherents otherwise impossible in the alienating world of Democratic politics.