Shooting the Arrow/Stroking the Arrow is a fictional documentary made up of two parts. The first part, Shooting the Arrow, is an autobiographical novel based on the author’s experience as a Maoist activist in Seattle in the 1970s and early 1980s. The story begins at the end, in 1981, when Fred, who has by now dropped out of the Party to become a writer, travels down to Los Angeles to investigate the police murder of Damian Garcia, a local Maoist activist. Los Angeles is a city of danger and diversity. Twenty percent of the population is foreign born, and much of the city is broken up into barrios and ghettos, where the police presence has the flavor of an army of occupation in a country like Vietnam. The interviews that Fred conducts show the high stakes and set an international context for the rest of the novel. The narrative then returns to the beginning of the story in 1971, when Fred first joins the Party. It follows Fred’s personal and family life, his life inside the Party and the Party’s political work in the shipyards, factories and on the streets. The narrative is episodic, similar in form to Brecht’s epic theatre, leaping to key personal and political conjunctures in Fred’s life, only this being a novel rather than a play, the conjunctures are not presented as single events, but as narrative units. The novel tells the story of what happened to an influential section of the Sixties movement that has largely been written out of the historical accounts, especially in the United States. Neither flower children nor mad bombers, these were activists who became hard core revolutionaries and tried to bring their revolutionary ideas back into the working class from which many of them had come. Stroking the Arrow is a study of the Maoist conception of dialectical materialism that forms the core philosophy of the main characters in the novel. I argue that Maoist dialectics is simply the further development of the process – begun by Marx and Engels and continued by Lenin – of stripping Hegelian dialectics of its teleological framework. The only universal law of Maoist dialectics is the unity and struggle of opposites: the contradiction in all things between the new and arising versus the old and dying away. As such, dialectics is a working tool, and its only ontological implication is that everything changes. Mao is the first in the tradition of Scientific Marxism to explicitly reject the universality of the law of negation of the negation with its teleological implications. History is a process without an absolute subject, but it is not a process without subjects of any kind. Rather, there is a unity of opposites between determinism and agency. Freedom does not lie in the suspension of causality, but in understanding and being able to consciously manipulate causal relations. The individual – or group – becomes a subject to the extent that it is able to consciously step outside the situation that created it. No matter how big the situation, there is always an outside. The object of Marxist political activism is to enable the working class to step outside the process that created it and become the subject of history, rather than its victim.

This thesis about the German-American political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau investigates in the development of his Weltanschauung. It grew out of a discomfort with structuralist and post-structuralist interpretations of Morgenthau’s thought which are distorted, curtate, and/or selective. This Weltanschauungsanalyse contributes to the understanding of Morgenthau and his oeuvre in three distinctive ways and negotiates hitherto existing shortcomings. First, it provides a panoptic rather than selective reading by considering all of Morgenthau’s major published and unpublished writings. It is, second, unifying rather than segregative in the sense that it reflects all aspects of Morgenthau’s thought and sets it into relation with each other. Finally, it is inclusive rather than exclusive meaning that the contexts in which Morgenthau developed his Weltanschauung are considered. This Weltanschauungsanalyse accentuates three dimensions in Morgenthau’s thought which are of relevance for contemporary theorising in International Relations. First, Morgenthau promoted a normative concept of power which is not to be confounded with violence, but to be considered as a group-dynamic element enabling to actively create a socio-political life world. Second, Morgenthau was one of the first IR-scholars to emphasise the conditionality of knowledge and political order, which makes his Weltanschauung a rich source for arguing that socio-political life is constructed and reason is limited as it enables to question “grand theories”. Finally, studying Morgenthau’s Weltanschauung concedes an important societal role to scholarship in the sense of dissidence. It is a sceptical appraisal of the socio-political status quo while being committed to a humanist normativity. To achieve this contribution to the current discourse on Morgenthau and elucidate his relevance for contemporary International Relations, this thesis applies Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus. It proceeds by, first, elaborating the field of Continental iv European intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which Morgenthau’s thought was formed. Based upon its findings it is possible to dissect Morgenthau’s Weltanschauung into its constitutive parts: ontology, epistemology, and political agency. Material for this analysis was procured in the Library of Congress, the Bodleian Library, the Hoover Institution, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, and the Archive for Christian-Democratic Policy of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

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The meaning ofsea power has been evasive since man began to exploit the sea. The list of definitions produced by scholars who have made an honourable attempt to explain it is extensive. The large number ofindividuals involved in this task has only managed to intensify the degree of intellectual turbulence. Many people have come to the conclusion that the challenge is far too great and, as a result, made a decision to sue for peace. This same misfortune has occurred to 1a..Ild. air, and space power. The quandary over a definition for all four power generators is solved by providing a structured and well-formulated model based on history's great strategic thinkers. The primary facilitator for this task is Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan and, therefore, his contribution makes him worthy of title recognition. The explanations developed in this thesis resulted from history, strategic theory,' related words and definitions, as well as elements of national power. Power based on strictly physical appearance is discredited as superficial.' This opens geographic boundaries traditionally associated with the four powers to allow formulation of unconventional factors not previously considered. Sea, land, air, and space power are not themselves physical. They instead signify a measure of applied pressure in varying forms. This may be directly or indirectly linked to their specific geographic domain. They exist within the confines of pressure application which, after all, is power being applied. Where that power originates from is not the important factor. The important factor is the recipient's location. This is the essence ofsea power.

This dissertation assesses how liberal theories of justice balance the ideas of choice and circumstance and why these explanations fall short. This dissertation will show how we can progress naturally from libertarian intuitions about moral agency through to a developed liberal account of justice. I will work through the theories of Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Philippe Van Parijs. By assessing these theories I will argue that liberal justice can balance the concern for individual choice and circumstance appropriately but that this requires specific developments of the liberal position. I will argue these developments are an understanding of fair shares in the prefaced but necessary market present in liberal theories in order to honour individual choices. This argument will lead us to endorse a specific conception of taxation based upon resources rather than end-results. The second development I argue for is the implementation of the Principle of Just Access to respect the moral agency of the handicapped. I will argue that in order to honour the choices of the handicapped properly, an account of liberal justice must prioritize compensation through a Principle of Just Access. The dissertation will conclude by asserting the potential validity of some of Van Parijs' institutional claims. I will show that although Van Parijs presents an incomplete liberal argument, we can defend many of his positions, particularly his arguments for universal basic income and resource rents, through a properly developed account of liberal justice. I present this account and show why a conception of fair shares within the market and the Principle of Just Access make this account unique and necessary.

In this thesis I argue that formal political power is a human-created artificiality, erected over previously unfettered lives for a specific purpose. As such, the act of establishing and maintaining political power can be assessed like any other person-affecting act, ethically, and must always be justified if it is to be considered legitimate. I show that underlying all such attempted justifications for political power is an implicit, but necessary, ethical contract: that political power X is justified only because it makes life 'better' for 'people' than it would be without it. Utilizing a form of ethical constructivism, I unpack a plausible account of what this universal political teleology can be said to objectively demand, constructing first a reasonable account of which 'people' we can justifiably say ought to be considered within the ethical contract (everyone affected), and then, working from that definition, and what we can reasonably claim to know of the shared goals and interests of such people, constructing a plausible account of what could be said to constitute a 'better' life for them (the protection and fulfilment of seven basic and universal 'species-interests'). I use this account as a critical tool, showing that, despite the multiplicity of varied political structures which have historically traded on divergent interpretations of this same underlying contract, once we have unpacked a compellingly objective account of its terms by which to judge each interpretation, there appears to be only one form of political power seemingly capable of fulfilling its requirements and thus achieving the legitimate goals of an objectively justified politics: a form of federated, small-scale anarchism, which I describe as 'authentic democracy'.

The thesis concludes that the turn to Spinoza has had a positive and enriching effect on Marxist thought.

The political system of the Roman Republic were based almost entirely on tradition, "the way of the ancestors," rather than on a written constitution. While the founders of the American Republic looked to ancient Rome as a primary model for their enterprise, nevertheless, in line with the rationalist spirit of their age, the American founders attempted to create a rational set of rules that would guide the conduct of American politics, namely, the U.S. Constitution. These two examples offer a striking case of the ideal types, famously delineated by Michael Oakeshott in "Rationalism in Politics" and elsewhere, between politics as a practice grounded in tradition and politics as a system based on principles flowing from abstract reasoning. Given that, I have explored how the histories of the two republics can help us to understand Oakeshott's claims about rational versus traditional politics, and, in particular, what the examples say about what Max Weber referred to as the 'causal adequacy' of these types. What factors led the American founders to partially reject and attempt to improve upon the Roman way To what extent did the Roman lack of a written constitution contribute to the downfall of their republic Why didn't the American reliance on written rules prevent the American state taking on a form quite different from that envisioned by the founders Through examining such issues we may come to understand better not only Oakeshott's critique of rationalism, but also modern constitutional theory, issues in the design of the European Union, and aspects of the revival of republicanism.

International institutions have promoted a ‘good governance’ agenda as an archetypal model to achieve development for underdeveloped and developing countries. However, closer scrutiny can trace the root of this agenda back to the hegemonic nature of modernity that proposes a specific meta-narrative upon others, as part of Eurocentrism. Many, however, have criticized this Eurocentric paradigm, since the non-Western communities with their own constructed version of ‘good’ in governance have also proven their ability to develop and prosper in the present or in the past. Thus, the cultural and value-laden nature of such vernacular concepts provides the rationale for the existence and practice of other paradigms. In line with this argument, Islam, with its long history of governance and richness of its values can be considered as another alternative, which should be thoroughly examined to disclose and depict its conceptualization and paradigm of ‘good governance’. The aim of this research, thus, is to explore and analyze the Islamic axioms, foundation principles and values underpinning the field of governance in an attempt to construct the architectonics of a new systemic and dynamic theory and formulate the articulation of ‘Islamic governance’. This discursive and abstract, rather than being an empirical exercise, assumes to produce a ‘good governance’ framework within its own formulation through a value-shaped dynamic model according to maqÉÎid al-SharÊÑah (higher objective of SharÊÑah) by going beyond the narrow remit of classical and contemporary discussions produced on the topic, which propose a certain institutional model of governance based on the classical juristic (fiqh) method. In this new dynamic paradigm, a discourse-oriented approach is taken to establish the philosophical foundation of the model by deriving it from Islamic ontology, which is then articulated using the Islamic epistemological sources to develop and formulate the discursive foundations of this new theoretical framework. A deductive method is applied to the ontological sources and epistemological principles to explain the architectonics of this new theory, which are represented by the constructed axioms, which later help to articulate the working mechanism of the proposed ‘Islamic good governance’ framework through a specifically formulated typology to function as an alternative conceptualization of ‘good governance’. This study, through an exclusive analytical discursive approach, finds that Islam as one of the major religions in the contemporary world with the claim of promising the underpinning principles and philosophical foundations of worldly affairs and institutions through a micro method of producing homoIslamicus could contribute towards development of societies by establishing a unique model of governance from its explicit ontological worldview through a directed descriptive epistemology. Thus, the research on governance in this study does not only focus on the positivistic materialist components such as institutions or mechanisms or growth per se, but it encompasses the value-laden holistic nature of human life in accordance with the Islamic worldview as an important contribution. In doing so, it formulates the ‘good governance’ in Islam in relation to the conceptualized ‘ihsani social capital’, which constitutes the main thrust of the constructed model. Nonetheless, this generative (non-cumulative) paradigm of looking into the governance issue should be viewed as an incomplete certainty as production of the continuous ijtihad (reasoning) progression will continue to reveal ways through which its working mechanism can be expanded along with potential developments in its philosophical formation.