The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate the relationship between women and politics in the mid-twentieth century South, by focusing on the activism of women in one Southern State. Studies of political groups that operated nationally, such as the League of Women Voters, have pointed to the importance of local chapters, but there have been few case studies to prove the real impact of such groups on politics or on women as individuals. Existing scholarship on women and politics emphasises women’s motivations and political identity, usually by marking women out as different to men. Applying these rules to women at local level, there is evidence both for and against common conceptions about women and politics. Studies of women as a group often fail to take into account the regional context of motivation, identity and the limitations on women to act. This study will examine the impact of grassroots political activity on women and their communities through a study of their experiences as members of the League of Women Voters in South Carolina, from 1947 to 1960. This work adds to three important bodies of literature. One is the increasing number of local and state studies mapping white and black women’s politics. Secondly it will add to literature mapping ways women were politically active in these years, establishing immediate roots of second wave feminism. This work has generally ignored the South. Thirdly the dissertation will add to increasing work on women in the postwar civil rights struggle.

This thesis is an attempt to reconstruct the decline and fall of Western Marxism as a theoretical-political discourse. 'Western Marxism' is taken to mean specifically the Marxist theories developed from the aftermath of the First World War onwards outside the Soviet Union and the official Communist Parties. The thesis provides a critical assessment of the successive restatements of Marxism since the 1960s. This study has three closely related aims. First, to examine the contours of Western Marxism through a thematic exposition of its most distinctive preoccupations: historical materialism, class theory, the question of ideology, and the politics of socialism. Second, to assess the success of the stories of revisionist attempts, and clarify how such attempts result in the deconstruction of Marxist theory. Third, to explore the ways in which Marxist theory has proved to be unreconstructable. The thesis takes the following form. The first chapter recounts the crisis-ridden development of historical materialism towards its dissolution. The second chapter examines the decline of Marxist class theory. The third chapter focuses on the question of ideology, and considers how the 'class and ideology' doctrine has proved to be exhausted. The last chapter deals with the demise of Marxist socialism in relation to the difficulties of Marxist political theory and its anti-market ideal. The legacy of Western Marxism has been the object of successive intellectual debates since the late 1970s. Yet arguably none of the previous contributions evaluate the decline of Western Marxism systematically. The thesis aims to fill this conspicuous absence and to clarify the issues raised by current debates on the legacy of Western Marxism.

This thesis demonstrates an historical approach to identifying the central innovations of Montesquieu's multi-faceted <I>De l'esprit des lois</I> (1748), taking its cues from his own identification of this theoretical targets and foils. Montesquieu shared his compatriots' widespread conviction that modern political societies' socioeconomic hierarchies played a key role in their prosperity by channeling citizens' competitive impulses into mutual service. However, he balked at suggestions that their intrinsic instability required that sovereigns actively maintain them with measures that prevented individual rights of disposal from undermining the public order of ranks, as he thought this would significant erode citizens' incentives to better themselves through nonviolent accumulation. For Montesquieu the key to a more effective and sustainable administrative system could be found by establishing more concretely the distinction English theorists had attempted to draw between a state, which represented a population's collective interests, and a government which routinely acted on its behalf, identifying and promoting those interests in particular cases. The psychological framework he developed allowed him both to highlight the dual nature of a political society's mandate (preserving peace and delivering justice), and to indicate how this division could be embodied in parallel military and judicial hierarchies without dividing sovereignty, or demanding a sovereign's perpetual intervention to prevent their conflict. The coherence of a legal system or state stemmed less from the wills of individual sovereigns than from a set of passions shared by subjects. Competition for personal esteem led neighbours to gravitate towards a common measure of value. The results created to resolve their disputes legitimated the type of proprietary claims necessary for self-aggrandisement according to that measure, so that a society's dominant passion became legally embodied as a common "spirit" or idea of justice.

Given the increasing number of public admissions of wrongdoing by official representatives of states, other institutions and individuals, as well as the subsequent scholarly attention directed to this phenomenon, this thesis investigates one potential misuse of such practices. Here, I take Albert Camus' novel The Fall as a starting point and ask if such admissions cannot ultimately be directed against 'others' through rhetorics of judge-penitence. Such an argumentative pattern aims to project the in-group as a penitent sinner which has faced its dark past and thus learnt the lessons provided by history. This creates, in turn, the possibility to construct an 'other' discursively as having failed to do so, i.e. as being morally inferior. Utilising Critical Discourse Analysis in the context of the debate over the Iraq crisis in 2002/3 in three European countries - Germany, Austria and Denmark - I focus on the (mis)use of self-critical references to the Holocaust and World War It in general. Through a qualitative analysis of particularly argumentative sections of broadsheet newspapers In each of these countries, the study illustrates the, albeit restricted, existence of such a phenomenon as well as its varieties. By exploring Maurlce Halbwachs' notions of collective memory, (non-)constructionist approaches aiming to explain the rising significance of admissions of wrongdoing and Charles S. Peirce's semiotics in the context of the public sphere, I explain the Influence of different historical contexts and national narratives on the existence and realisation of rhetoric(s) of judge-penitence. By applying Jurgen Habermas' Critical Theory when elaborating the moral significance of memory, I theoretically justify normative evaluations of both admissions of past wrongdoing and their rhetorical misuse. In conclusion, and going beyond my chosen test cases, the thesis illuminates how admissions of wrongdoing may be (mis)used in political discourse.

In the recent literature Socrates is identified as a main advocate of political authoritarianism. Political authoritarianism as a theory of the legitimacy of political authority comprises the following basic tenets: 1. There are normative political truths. <I>2. </I>Only some (and relatively few) know the normative political truths. 3. Only those who know normative political truths have a moral right (claim, entitlement) to rule and the rest have a moral reason to obey them. The ascription of political authoritarianism to Socrates runs contrary to the current orthodoxy which views Socrates as the champion of individual autonomy and freedom. In the first part of my dissertation I defend the ascription of political authoritarianism to Socrates against the orthodox interpretation. But my argument differs from the recent attempts to credit Socrates with political authoritarianism in two important respects: a) I argue for an intrinsic connection between Socrates' political authoritarianism and his theory of knowledge; and b) I credit Socrates with a modified version of 3 according to which Socrates does not recognise a moral right to rule correlated with a duty to obey but merely holds the thesis that the political knowledge is the sole requirement one should satisfy to be appropriate for the task of ruling. In the second part of my dissertation I examine what is wrong with the third tenet of political authoritarianism as traditionally formulated and argue for the superiority of Socrates' modified version. The fault with tenet 3 is that it is based on the assumption that there is a substantive right to rule correlated with a duty to obey. I argue that the right to rule is not an operative reason for action (or else it is not the grounds of a duty to obey), but it is merely a 'task-justification right': by claiming that <I>A </I>has a right to rule we state that he has the appropriate qualifications for the task of ruling. In this way the legitimacy of political authority is dissociated from the duty to obey. Finally, I examine Socrates' modified version of 3 and argue that possession of knowledge is not the sole requirement a particular person should satisfy to be appropriate for the task of ruling.

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