The problems of post-nineteen sixties left-wing politics are explored by analysing a hypothetical collective memory of the left. This memory claims that the hegemony over thought and practice held by Marxism has been broken down since the nineteen sixties by many different non-class based forms of oppression. The nature of Marxism as one political movement among other such movements is then explored and implications for any movement that tries to base itself on unified and universal values are outlined. It is argued that any politics based on unified values will create oppression because the values of such a politics will exclude the values of some other group. The possibility that politics can be based on difference is then explored. The works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard are examined as examples of difference based political theories. It is then concluded that, in general, difference is an inadequate basis for liberatory politics because difference based politics is only concerned to protect the process of differentiation and so ignores the particular values on which anti-oppression movements have been based. The possibility that difference and value based theories and movements are actually part of the one debate and do not follow each other in a linear progression is then analysed. The difference/value debate is characterised as consisting of paralysed motion because both difference and value have important critiques of each other and answers to those critiques, thereby creaating a constant motion between the two poles of difference and value which yet never moves beyond these two poles.

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a full account of the origins and development of Thomas Reid's political thought. Its central argument is that the political thought of Reid's mature years was the inescapable result of a long-standing confrontation with Humean scepticism, in which he steadfastly strove to reassert the Moderate Christian principles he had imbibed in his youth and which he articulated most fully in his common-sense philosophy. This conclusion is based largely on manuscript evidence. The surviving lecture notes on politics from Reid's moral philosophy course at Glasgow College are here transcribed and presented for the first time, having been painstakingly reconstructed on the basis of internal evidence and by means of close comparison with surviving lecture notes taken down by Reid's students. Before the present author conducted his research, none of the student material, amounting to several manuscript volumes, had been systematically transcribed. One set of student notes particularly rich in politics material was completely unknown to previous scholars. In addition to drawing upon this manuscript record, this dissertation attempts to reconstruct the content of Reid's early intellectual formation as this pertains to the later development of his teaching on politics. Part 1 traces the origins and development of Reid's political thought from his early tuition under George Turnbull at Marischal College, Aberdeen and examines his philosophical development while he was librarian of Marischal and minister of the parish of New Machar. Part 2 continues the analysis of the progress of Reid's thinking during his days as regent of philosophy at King's College, Aberdeen. Part 3 concludes the argument by exploring the successive changes that Reid made to his political teaching while he was professor at Glasgow, i.e., at a late stage of his encounter with Hume's political science and Adam Smith's jurisprudence.

Existing liberal, libertarian and conservative critical approaches to Hayek suffer from a severe partiality in the way they address his theory. Their insufficiency, however, is bound up with problems intrinsic to Hayek's own thought. The ambiguities in the relation between ontology and epistemology and the alleged independence of method from its subject produce the theoretical basis of a highly subjectivist and conservative social history. This ambiguous mixture of conservatism and positivism finds its expression in political philosophy in the tension between an idealist advocacy of liberal values and a thorough defence of an unconditional evolutionism. In Hayek's political theory the above mentioned ambiguities are stressed to the extreme. Thus, the tension between the existing and the desirable, which derives from an inherently contradictory epistemology, produces a situation of constant vicious circularity; the existing and the desirable, in the form of evolutionist justificationism and idealist liberal normativism respectively, appear as at the same time on another's preconditions and results. Hayek's failure to achieve self-consistency in his political theory is demonstrated through a discussion of his ambivalent attitude to democracy, authoritarianism, social justice and the welfare state. It is concluded that, despite the contradictions inherent in its premises and structure, Hayek's theory achieves its wide influence owing to its <i>de facto</i> endorsement of the pattern of capitalist social relations which exists today.

This thesis takes as its focus the essays of George Orwell published between 1931 and 1941. I locate these essays within the arena of debate afforded by the Left-leaning periodicals in which most first appeared, emphasising the crucial (though hitherto neglected) importance of the periodical medium to the development and transmission of Orwell's arguments. Many of the essays considered here are salvaged from obscure or defunct journals, and have been lost to the public gaze for more than half a century. As a result of the inclusion of this material, the thesis consitutes the most complete and sustained analysis to date of Orwell's early essays. In Chapter One I note an inherent critical dimension in the essay form itself, one compatible with Orwell's polemical approach. An historical survey of the development of the periodical traces how the periodical essay comes to be established firmly in the field of public debate, culminating in a sketch of the periodical background in which Orwell's essays were published. In the five chapters which follow, I examine the essays under five rubrics: Imperialism; the Spanish Civil War; Totalitarianism; Socialism, and Literature. Each chapter charts the visions and revisions which characterise Orwell's thought in a turbulent decade, with particular reference to the periodicals in which he and others set out their views. Such contextualisation registers Orwell's conscious use of the periodical medium, both to promote his own controversial opinions, and to assail the arguments of his opponents. The approach of the thesis necessarily facilitates a wider perspective than that of Orwell's essays, and I argue for the significance of the periodical as a means of debate in the literature and volatile section of the Left in which Orwell chose to operate.

How can we pursue egalitarian distributive justice? Starting from the assumption that an egalitarian distribution of advantage is one in which no one is worse off than anyone else as a matter of luck, this thesis examines how such a distribution might be brought about. It begins with an investigation of how the luck egalitarian ideal should be interpreted, advancing a critique of the ‘attributivist’ approach to conceptualizing luck developed by Andrew Mason and a (limited) defence of the ‘metaphysical’ approach favoured by G. A. Cohen and others. It then turns to the question of what can be done about the inegalitarian influence of luck on people’s levels of advantage, proposing a pluralist approach to the regulatory strategies of luck egalitarian distributive justice. It argues that, in addition to ‘redistributive compensation’, strategies of ‘levelling’ and ‘direct structural regulation’ should be included in the luck egalitarian armoury. The thesis then applies these arguments to a case study of contemporary internships in the UK. While internships have become a crucial route into employment within many professional sectors, they have yet to receive any sustained critical attention from egalitarian political philosophers. The thesis demonstrates how the distribution of internships contributes to distributive injustice and then examines the various regulatory actions luck egalitarians might endorse in response to that injustice. The ways in which contemporary injustice is produced are many and varied: the pluralist approach to luck egalitarian regulatory strategies provides a useful and clear framework within which to identify and evaluate the many and varied ways in which we might respond.

No description available.

This work consists of a study of the historical, philosophical and political elements determining the essence of freedom and subjectivity in contemporary society. It identifies the origin of subjectivity in Renaissance Humanism, and demonstrates that Humanism's definition of individual freedom and subjectivity became a base upon which the Anglo-Germanic Romantics grounded their intellectual and political framework. The philosophical parallel between Humanism and Romanticism, the projects of which express subjectivity and freedom in terms of 'creation' and 'individualism', establishes a basis from which a study of postmodernism (French post-structuralism) shows that postmodernists, in spite of their critique of modernity, continue to define freedom and subjectivity along the same lines. It contends that the postmodernist critique of society espouses a severely limited notion of subjectivity, i.e. one which is basically negative and anti-social, and whose effect on the way individuals view themselves as socio-political agents is detrimental. This study is not one which aims to discount the importance of the postmodernist critique altogether. Rather, it shows that there are many elements which enter into the definition of freedom and subjectivity as a 'lived' experience in the world, such as those present in Hegelian philosophy, which are often concealed, or negated by postmodernism's rejection of dialectics in history. The study takes as central the Hegelian definition of the elements constituting the process of actualisation of subjectivity and freedom in society, and argues that all three identified intellectual movements, Humanism, Romanticism and Postmodernism, fail to recognise that the <I>other</I>, the means, is not a <I>thingness</I>, a whatness, nor is it other individuals, but is itself an <I>activity</I> the base of which is social, and whose telos is present in the objective order. The work argues that although postmodernism defends individual rights against a visibly declining social, political and ethical order, it does not present individuals with alternatives that are feasible and desirable in today's social and political context.

Within the realm of politics, there are two forces which have considerable influence upon the social dynamics of a civilisation because they comprise the fundamental desires of human nature and influence the common aspirations that a society might possess. They are the components of human striving which presuppose all political systems and societal constructs. The first of these aspects is defined as the utopian impulse and pertains to the forward looking or visionary component of a culture. It is the element of a societies' common will that sets forth the image of the desired future which motivates its social and political structures to produce corresponding speculative projections in real and practical terms. Without a consciousness of such objectives, the progress of a civilisation may falter and cultural atrophy sets in which leads to an overall decline in the quality of life of its people. If the trend continues unabated, cultural stagnation sets in, giving rise to social unrest, apathy, and disillusionment. Closely related to this, is another intrinsic drive contained within human nature that compels Mankind to forge the social and political constructs that have the ability to transform the narrative devised by the utopian consciousness into a practical political discourse that presupposes the political act. It is this alliance of utopian speculation and the existing hierarchies of Power which provides the basic attributes needed to bring about transformations of the institutions for the progress of the culture as a whole. Consequently, coupled with these potential benefits are the dangers of repression and alienation that can also be products of such a relationship of desires.

I begin by exploring the foundational notion of popular sovereignty as guiding ideal - or at least key precondition - of constitutionalism. By sanctioning the public political sphere, constitutional law maps out a universe of politics. I will approach the intersection of law and politics from the republican perspective, where the role of law is seen as substantiating the ideal of popular sovereignty and as empowering politics. Constitutionalism, here, is above all about self-determination and sovereignty and sanctions the processes where the sovereign will is formed. I review the theories of some key advocates of "civic" republicanism and describe their institutional suggestion for the "containment" of the politics of civil society. I employ systems theory in order to confront the republican claim that the politics of civil society can be contained (and empowered) by the law; with the help of the theory I explore the relationship between conflict and law and suggest that law allows for conflict only selectively, by setting the thresholds of valid dissensus, the <I>when</I> and <I>how</I> of possible conflict. In the process not only is much repressed but much is appropriated as well, as political conflicts to be represented are forced to meet criteria of legal relevance. I argue this via 11 inter-related theses against republicanism. In each of these theses I discuss one aspect of this silencing or depletion of political conflict to suggest that at crucial junctions where constitutive political connections are articulated, republicans advocate a containment that is either arbitrary, question-begging or self-defeating.

This thesis explores and elaborates the notion of ‘collective political subject’ as a philosophical and historical category through a critical approach to the work of Alain Badiou and Ernesto Laclau, but also by way of an excursion into different treatments of this notion in continental philosophy. Through the choice of these two thinkers, this study aims to contribute to a line of thought that, rather than an abandonment of the notion of the subject, deems it necessary for emancipatory politics. It argues that, despite a prioritization of the individuated subject over the collective in the history of philosophy, the political work of these thinkers enable us to perceive of the subject as generic or universal and political, what we refer to as ‘the collective’ in this thesis. Politics in this context is intimately tied up with the modern category of the subject as the capacity for the‘active’ subversion of the principle of subjection and subordination. That is why the category of the subject is intrinsically implicated with the concepts of subversion/rupture, politics, and emancipation. The thesis subsequently stages an encounter between this redefined category (of the subject) and a historical experience that vividly brings to life the formation of the collective political subject. This historical instance is the Iranian Revolution (1979) as the greatest mass uprising of the second half of the 20th century. The Green Movement (2009) will be also observed in terms of a sequel of this Revolution as an unfinished project, reflecting the incessant push and pull between ‘the collective’ and an authoritarian State. This encounter between philosophy and history allows us to see what a long struggle for emancipation or fulfilment of democratic demands entails. The incentive for this thesis springs from an absence of any philosophical approaches to this Revolution and its consequences, a lack that not only surrenders the emancipatory potentials of this Revolution to the backwaters of history, but also jettisons the characteristics that make this revolution a desirable model for an engagement with the plight of the political subject.