Resume The dissertation thesis The Life and Times of Jozef Lenart deals with life and political influence of a Communist politician Jozef Lenart. The work begins with Lenart's childhood in the Slovak countryside and his maturing in the service of Bata concern where Lenart was trained. From depiction of Lenart participation in Slovak uprising author goes to the main topic of the thesis. It is almost 45 years political activity of Lenart in various party's and state functions. During such a long career Jozef Lenart became among others, the prime minister of the Czechoslovakian government and a member of the leading management of the Communist party. Author in direct contradiction to the concept of totalitarianism and widely shared ideas about a party leadership as a monolithic opinion power centres approached political influence of Jozef Lenart as a description of mutual interactions within the dictatorial regime. Author also defined Lenart's political attitudes and affiliation with interest and opinion groups and assessed how successfully Lenart managed to assert his views.

This dissertation seeks to offer the first extensive account of Raymond Aron's critical interactions with major US academics and intellectuals during the Cold War. In doing so it demonstrates that Aron regularly criticized the liberal ideology of his American Cold War allies using language remarkably similar to his much more famous critiques of French Marxism. It demonstrates this by looking at Aron's thinking on neoliberalism, theories of global development and international relations realism. It also offers an alternative interpretation of Aron's role in the so-called French liberal revival of the 1970s.

Following the collapse of the Japanese Empire (1945) and the devastation of the Korean War (1950-1953), the question of how to represent and imagine “everyday life” or “way of life” (saenghwal, 生活) became a focal point of post-colonial and Cold War contestations. For example, President Syngman Rhee’s administration attempted to control the discourse of “New Life” (shinsaenghwal) by linking the spatio-temporality of the everyday to reconstruction and modernization. “Everyday life” was also a concept of strategic interest to the United States, whose postwar hegemonic ambitions in East Asia meant spreading “the truth” about an idealized vision of American way of life through government agencies such as the United States Information Service (USIS). These ideas and representations were designed to interpellate the South Korean people into a particular kind of regulatory relationship with their bodies and minds, their conduct of their day-to-day lives, their vision of themselves within the nation and the “Free World.” “Everyday life” became, in other words, part-and-parcel of Cold War governmentality’s mechanism of subjectification. Overly privileging these top-down discourses and techniques, however, can foreclose a nuanced understanding of a rich and complex set of negotiations over the meaning of saenghwal underway in both elite intellectual and popular imagination. Through my examination of literature, criticism, reportage, human-interest stories, government bulletins, philosophical essays, photography (artistic, popular, journalistic, archival, exhibition), cartoons, and educational and feature films, I characterize this period broadly in terms of “postwar crisis of modernity.” If “colonial modernity” in Korea had consisted of tensions and collaborations between colonialism, enlightenment, and modernization, then the emergent neocolonial order of the Cold War would give rise to a reconfiguration of this problematic: national division, South Korea’s semi-sovereignty vis-à-vis the U.S. and the denial of decolonization accompanied by the false promise of democratic freedom and American-style prosperity. Negotiations of this crisis can be found across urban and rural space, contesting the representation and dissemination of universalist and developmentalist “everyday life,” which was linked to the postwar restoration of the enlightenment subject. The stakes of these contestations through the framework of saenghwal could be ontological, aesthetic, economic, affective or universalist, and were articulated across popular and intellectual registers. While works of recent English-language scholarship in modern Korean history have productively explored the question of everyday life during the colonial period and in DPRK after liberation, no work thus far has examined the significance of the relationship between intermediality and saenghwal in the cultural field of ROK in the postwar 1950s. In addition to building on the current trend of scholarship that emphasizes the continuity between colonial and post-colonial cultural formations, my analysis of literature opens up future avenues of research for those interested in understanding literature’s intersection with modes of reportage, photography, and mass visuality. The chapter on the countryside draws from a diverse array of cultural productions to analyze a space that has traditionally been discussed within the limited geopolitical context of U.S. aid and development; no scholar to my knowledge has undertaken medium-specific inquiry to think through ontological and aesthetic negotiations unfolding in the countryside. My chapter on film culture reads the postwar debates around plagiarism/imitation, melodrama/sinp’a, and realism/neorealism through the gendering discourse of “everyday feelings” (saenghwal kamjŏng), and analyzes understudied films of the era with particular attention paid to their exploration of postwar sentiment. Finally, the last chapter intervenes on the wealth of existing scholarship on The Family of Man in visual studies by situating it within a broader formation of the postwar enlightenment subject as a democratic modernizing ideal. By focusing on the affective premise of this ideal, I contribute to the existing scholarship on theories of everyday life, sovereignty, and Cold War culture, which have tended to neglect the role of intermediation and affective interpellation in the governmentality of everyday life.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation examines a moment of unprecedented crisis in Japan's modern history - the crisis of defeat - and the impact it had on the Japanese self-image. Defeat unleashed a wide range of responses, from profound despair (kyodatsu) to a sense of new life (shinsei). Just as the material destruction of defeat defined the landscape of Japan's cities, so too did the coexistence of these two emotions create the psychological ground from which public discussion about Japan's past, present, and future emerged. From these discussions arose two interrelated debates, one concerning who was responsible for war and defeat, and the other focusing on the defects in the national character. In both cases, many Japanese believed that the resolution of these debates was a necessary first step in constructing a peace-loving, democratic nation. The deconstruction of the national character was akin to the process of negation through which many Japanese people believed they could discard the "sins of the past" and move smoothly forward into the new postwar world order. It is in this context that Tanabe Hajime's "philosophy of repentance" (zangedd) is relevant, both as a model and a metaphor for the Japanese attempt to overcome the past. Ultimately, however, Tanabe's road to salvation was not taken by many, partly due to the intellectual difficulty of his message, but also due to the re-emergence of the Emperor whose reconstruction as a symbol of new life circumscribed the public debates over war responsibility and the deconstruction of the national character, leaving unresolved fundamental questions concerning the Japanese peoples' relationship with their own past. Drawing on a broad variety of primary sources, this study explores these debates and the Emperor's resurrection in a brief but intense four-year period after Japan's defeat. Any appreciation of later postwar history must begin from this era. Through the experiences and memories of the "generation of the scorched earth" (yakeato jidai) we can gain new insights into Japan's re-emergence as an economic power, the preoccupation with "new," and the enduring sense of particularism that predominates in Japan today.

This thesis traces the relationship between militarism and geographical thought in the United States during the early Cold War. It does so by traveling across certain spaces, or environments, which preoccupied American geopolitics and American science during the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, geopolitics and science, understood during the Second World War as markedly distinct terms, came together uniquely to wage the Cold War from the position of strategy. The most intriguing and influential conjunctions were made possible by militarism, not in the deterministic sense of conditioning technologies or funding lines, but as a result of antagonistic, violent practices pervading American life. These practices reaffirmed America's status as distinctly, powerfully modern, while shoring up the burden of global responsibility that appeared to accompany this preeminence. Through militarist reasoning, the American world was turned into an object that needed securing - resulting in a profoundly insecure proliferation of danger that demanded an equal measure of global action and retreat behind new lines of defence. And in these American spaces, whether expanded or compressed, the identity of America itself was defined. From the global horizons of air power and the regional divisions of area studies to the laboratories of continental and civil defence research, the spaces of the American Cold War were material, in the sense that militarism's reach was clearly felt on innumerable human and natural landscapes, not least within the United States. Equally, however, these environments were the product of imaginative geographies, perceptual and representational techniques that inscribed borders, defined hierarchies, and framed populations governmentally. Such conceptions of space were similarly militarist, not least because they drew from the innovations of Second World War social science to reframe the outlines of a Cold War world. Militarism's methods redefined geographical thought and its spaces, prioritizing certain locations and conventions while marginalizing others. Strategic studies formed a key component of the social sciences emboldened by the successes and excesses of wartime science. As social scientists grappled with the contradictions of mid-century modernity, most retreated behind the formidable theories of their more accomplished academic relatives, and many moved into the laboratories previously associated with these same intellectual stalwarts. The result was that at every scale, geography was increasingly simulated, a habit that paralleled the abstractions concurrently promoted in the name of political decisiveness. But simulation also meant that Cold War spaces were more than the product of intangible musings; they were constructed, and in the process acquired solidity but also simplicity. It was in the fashioning of artificial environments that the fragility of strategy was revealed most fully, but also where militarism's power could be most clearly expressed. The term associated with this paradoxical condition was 'frontier', a zone of fragile, transformational activity. Enthusiastic Cold Warriors were fond of transferring this word from a geopolitical past to a scientific future. But in their present, frontiers possessed the characteristics of both.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate and chronicle the career of conservative Republican Senator, Homer E. Capehart who served Indiana during the administrations of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.While the dissertation examined the long political career of the Indiana Senator, special emphasis was placed upon Capehart's contribution as a "cold warrior" to the formation of American foreign policy from World War II to 1962.Most of the information collected on the Senate career of Capehart came from the following sources: (1) Interviews conducted with the former Senator and numerous individuals, both friend and foe, who were personally involved in Capehart's turbulent political career; (2) Correspondence conducted with several individuals who had direct knowledge of Capehart's career; (3) Many newspaper and magazine articles reporting the Senator's statements, senatorial and public performance during his three terms; (4) Books concerning political topics in which Capehart had a direct involvement; (5) The Congressional Record and the Congressional Quarterly Almanac,, recording the Senator's public statements and voting records; (6) The extensive collection of private documents and letters of the "Capehart Collection" located in the Indiana State Historical Library; and (7) Valuable information gathered from other Indiana public university libraries, especially Indiana University.The dissertation investigates Senator Capehart's contributions against the background of the Cold War. The paper is organized chronologically. Each chapter deals with a specific interval in Homer Capehart's career. The first chapter details Capehart's early life and subsequent business career. The second chapter investigates Capehart's rise to political power. The third chapter examines the early days of Capehart's Senate tenure under the Truman administration. The fourth chapter chronicles Capehart's political career during the Eisenhower years. The final chapter looks at Capehart's career during the Kennedy administration with special attention directed toward Capehart's involvement in the Cuban missile crisis and his last political campaign.Capehart, the politician businessman, was the personification of the Horatio Alger saga. The former Senator, who was born into a poor Southern Indiana rural environment, had amassed a personal fortune in the jukebox business by his 40th birthday. Politically, life began at 40 for Capehart who then directed his talents and tremendous energy toward establishing a powerful political base from which he eventually secured a seat in the United States Senate.Capehart went to Franklin Roosevelt's Washington as a businessman, and as a vociferous supporter of free enterprise during the final days of World War II. He gained his senatorial reputation as a loyal protege of Senator Robert A. Taft who led the fight against President Truman to deregulate the domestic economy and to prevent the internationalization of the nation's foreign policies. Capehart became a respected member of the conservative Republican Foreign Relations Committee and a powerful member of the Senate Banking Committee during the Eisenhower years. During the Kennedy era, he became a vocal opponent of Democratic "fiscal irresponsibility" and an acknowledged expert on Latin American affairs. Capehart was one of the chief critics of the Kennedy administration's handling of the Cuban missile crisis, a position which not only gave him his greatest national publicity but which, ironically, also contributed mightily to his final political defeat.

Housing was considered a public good rather than a marketable commodity at the early stage in the development of most socialist countries. Governments in those countries assumed full responsibility for urban housing finance, construction, allocation, management, maintenance and rehabilitation. A policy of low official rents and high subsidies was adopted as the method to ensure that all urban residents would have access to the state built housing stock. Success in solving the housing problem was to be a showpiece for the socialist countries. However, after approximately forty years of development of the socialist housing economy, many urban residents in countries such as China and Hungary still face severe housing problems. The governments in these two countries have initiated a variety of new efforts in recent years in an attempt to improve the living conditions of their urban residents. In spite of this, many urban housing problems persist and some are even becoming worse. In view of this situation, both governments have introduced new housing policies which recognize certain aspects of housing as a commodity within the socialist economy. A major aim of these new policies is to encourage individual financial participation in residential construction. This approach, commonly referred to as the policy of housing commercialization, is considered by government to be a feasible approach to resolving the tenacious urban housing problem and an effective means to significantly improve living conditions for all urban residents. By undertaking a comparative study of China's and Hungary's urban housing policies, housing delivery systems and housing problems, this research endeavours to describe and assess the rationale and other associated factors behind this housing policy transformation in both China and Hungary. In addition, this research examines the lessons of Hungary's housing policy reform and concludes with a set of policy recommendations for China's future urban housing efforts. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate