Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1982. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-203).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1973. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Alasdair Macintyre asserts in After Virtue that contemporary moral discourse is only arbitrary assertion of the will. Appeals to reasoned arguments have been replaced by expressions of preference, attitude and feeling-- in short, by "emotivism." Macintyre locates this moral breakdown in the Enlightenment philosophers' failed attempt to replace Aristotelian teleology with a rational justification for morality. Macintyre's analysis fails because he does not show whose interests are served through the assertion of arbitrary supposed will or whose interests were served when "objective" standard of the Middle the Ages prevailed. He does not acknowledge the preeminent role the material relations of production and exchange in the construction of a society's moral standards. A class analysis suggests that emotivism originated in the overthrow of feudal society by the newly developing industrial class of free traders. The concept of the "free individual" facilitated the organization of production on the basis of wage-labour. The ensuing class struggle led to the dominance of emotivism in contemporary moral discourse. Macintyre's revised version of the Aristotelian concept of the telos cannot establish a rational basis for morality. Without structural changes designed to eliminate class divisions, emotivism cannot be supplanted. It can only be suppressed by means of instruments such as Macintyre's version of the telos. It is because Macintyre fails to analyze emotivism as the product of class struggle that he advises us to prepare for "the new dark ages which are already upon us" (Macintyre, After Virtue, hereinafter referred to as AV, p. 263).

The problem of political systems wholly or in part contained within other political systems has not often been treated in the literature of political science. When the matter has arisen, it is characteristically been handled by a "closed system" and "sub-collectivity" model. That is, the larger polity has often been assumed to be composed of a number of closed collectivities. This model assumes that citizens will know more about, participate more vigorously in, and feel more strongly about, political systems which are physically "closer" to them. But, in North America, Britain, and France, citizens vote at a much lower level in local elections than in national elections. Survey data from the Vancouver area indicate that secondary school students, at least, know much less about their community political systems than about regional, national, and "supra-national" systems. Fragmentary data from the United States and France tend to support these conclusions. The local community polity has, however, some interesting -infrastructural features. One of these is that its system of political communications is much inadequate to keeping its members informed about the local system; its stimuli are greatly outnumbered by political stimuli transmitted by "extra-systemic" "over-arching" media, and this is undoubtedly one of the major reasons for a low level of local political cognition. Another feature is that citizens involved in local organizations and structures explicitly of the local system often show a greater interest in local political activity; these structures form the "residuals" or "skeleton" of a shrunken polity. A final feature, suggested by some data and much speculation, is that the local system is a "low-affect" system. Finally a model is constructed which is believed to be a better representation of the observed reality than the traditional models discussed in an earlier chapter. This model is that of the "partial political system". A partial system is defined as one which does not contain within itself all the political life-experiences of the member units. The several propositions upon which this model is based have a number of ramifications for the structure and process of local politics. The theory of the partial political system has several implications for other branches of political science: (1) comparative politics; (2) normative democratic theory; (3) international relations theory. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

Political recruitment is a process by which individuals with certain expectations and occupying certain specified social positions ln their community are screened by representatives of political institutions for elective office. In this inquiry, three pairs of variables corresponding to the three elements of the process -- resources, opportunities, and motivation (interpreted as expectations )-- are structured into a research schema. This schema is applied to the Members of the Ontario Legislative Assembly with the objective of identifying recurring uniformities of activity among the recruitment experiences of those political actors. / Master of Arts (MA)

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