A re-evaluation of the early fiction of Harriet Martineau (1802-76) is timely. In failing to interrogate the reciprocity between Martineau’s interpretation of personal experience and her fiction, scholars have not fully appreciated its purpose. Thus, modern criticism has accepted Martineau’s dismissive judgement of her earliest tales. Five Years of Youth (1831) has been labelled a pastiche of Jane Austen, and the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4), which established Martineau’s fame, have also been subject to bruising attack – as poor art, and ideologically mendacious. Most scholars see the novel Deerbrook (1839) as a conventional romance. Although Linda Peterson and Lana Dalley rightly identify in Martineau’s fiction the trope of domesticity and its political dimension, the argument of this thesis is more specific. Message and discourse, whether couched as political economy, children’s adventure or romance, were shaped by Martineau’s ‘heartland concepts’. The product of her subjectivity, these core values were a sense of duty (initially allied to a previously-unacknowledged soteriology of ‘safety’); a welcome offered to adversity as a stimulus to progress; an attack on superstition as an enemy to intellectual and moral progress; and household relationships which were inclusive of children and servants and stimulated community engagement. Martineau’s definition of community, predicated on a sense of belonging, initially reflected the networking of her Norwich household. It was subsequently redefined as wherever her own household could meet a local need. This interpretation is supported by an analysis of Martineau’s engagement with her adopted community of Ambleside, where, in putting into practice her fictional teachings, she demonstrated reciprocity in action.

In this thesis, I study the economic policy models supported by influential academic economists in Brazil over the eleven years following the implementation of the Plano Real. I focus on two economic research institutions: the Economics Department at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA). I first show how economists affiliated with these institutions were in a position to influence policy due to their prestige, academic power, and strong formal and informal ties to the policymaking bureaucracy. I then analyze working papers published by PUC-Rio and IPEA from 1995-2005 and show that the institutions produce three distinct, coherent economic policy discourses. I conclude by showing parallels between economic policy outcomes in Brazil during the period and the economic policy ideas found in the working papers. / text

After the Meiji Restoration of 1862, Western philosophy was imported and infused into Japanese culture and its intellectual climate. By the early 20th Century, Kyoto School philosophers and romantic authors sought to reaffirm Japanese culture, believed jeopardised by the hastened development of Western capitalist modernity. This movement became politically charged, and is not without fascist allegations. After the Second World War modernism again became a primary intellectual concern, as modernists and Asianists alike attempted to struggle with the idea of fascism in Japan. Works of Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) and Watsuji Tetsuro (1889-1960), and the prewar contexts within which they were written, will be compared to the postwar thinkers Maruyama Masao (1914-1996) and Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977). The purpose of this thesis is to examine how Japanese thinkers before and after the Second World War understood and responded to the global process of modernity, and how it relates to such political movements as liberalism and fascism.

Thesis advisor: Mary Ann Glynn / I examine the process of evolution for theoretical constructs in the field of organizational scholarship, leveraging the sociology of knowledge literature and empirical studies of construct development to focus my research. Prior studies suggest several key factors operating in the process--actor-oriented components, including the characteristics and strategies of scholarly actors, and situationally-oriented components of historical context and word meanings. No study, however, has assessed these factors in interaction over time. I address this gap through a historical study based primarily on archival data regarding construct usage in journal articles and scholarly books. Specifically, I explore the evolution of "cooperation" and "purpose" in organizational scholarship from 1938 through 2005. My findings contribute to elaboration of the theory of construct evolution proposed by Hirsch & Levin (1999), as I observe that a construct developing largely within a single disciplinary paradigm is marked by narrowing rather than expansion of meaning in the course of increased operationalization. Further, I find that an interdisciplinary context of evolution multiplies not just meanings but also the language used for a construct. I also document how antecedent conditions of meaning for the words "cooperation" and "purpose," as well as elements of historical context, affect the evolution process. In addition, my study extends the observations of Barley & Kunda (1992) regarding a cyclical dichotomy between rational and normative paradigms in managerial discourse, as I observe this pattern contributing to the fragmentation of language and meanings in the constructs studied. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Organization Studies.

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is known today as one of the most influential German Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century. His most celebrated work, The Star of Redemption, has earned him a reputation as a challenging religious thinker with increasing relevance for contemporary religious, philosophical and historical debates. However, this legacy has largely ignored his first published book, Hegel and the State (1920). My dissertation is the first English-language monograph to fully explore Rosenzweig's intellectual biography of Hegel, making a contribution to contemporary Hegel and Rosenzweig scholarship alike. I offer an analysis that draws on the formal characteristics of the work--such as the epigraph, the narrative and biographical structure, as well as the historical presuppositions of the foreword and the conclusion--to show how Rosenzweig's interpretation of Hegel's key texts, culminating in the Philosophy of Right, is informed by his own biographical development and the influence of thinkers such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Meinecke. By recasting his critique of Hegel's political thinking into biographical and historical terms, I ultimately argue that Rosenzweig's narrative in Hegel and the State is a tragic foil for his own development as a German historian. In Rosenzweig's interpretation, the relationship between the individual and the state championed by Hegel ends in the tragic separation of the individual from the reconciliatory promise of Idealist thought. By unearthing Rosenzweig's latent theory of tragedy in Hegel and the State--evidenced most clearly in how he situates the figures of Friedrich Hölderlin and Napoleon--I argue that the historical and philosophical crisis that marked the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly Rosenzweig's own biographical crisis, shapes his work as the author of Hegel and the State. In addition to providing a critical commentary on the cultural, philosophical and literary history of the German nation, as well as providing the first English translation of many passages from Hegel and the State, my dissertation lays the necessary groundwork for a reinterpretation of Rosenzweig's critique of German Idealism in The Star of Redemption.

This dissertation examines Scottish unionist political thought and intellectual history in the period from 1885-1886 to 1965. It provides an analytical examination of unionist positions examining such areas as political history, ecclesiology, sectarianism, historiography and unionist-nationalist sentiment. It contextualises unionist thought within Scotland's history and offers findings based on both archival and primary sources research along with a thorough background of historiography. It both contextualises and examines the complexities of Scottish unionism during this vital period between the Liberal Party's split over Irish Home Rule until the reorganisation of the Scottish Unionist Party in 1965. It illuminates the spectrum of unionist discourse during this period and demonstrates the complexities of Scotland's constitutional and cultural relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom.

This dissertation traces the development of Charles A. Beard’s social, political, legal and historical thought. It covers his early education in Indiana, his cosmopolitan postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford, Cornell University and Columbia University, and professional work as political scientist and as expert on municipal government. By following thematically and chronologically the relationship between Beard’s historical writings and his early life as teacher of politics and government, this dissertation offers both a reinterpretation of the meaning of Beard’s interpretation of the origins of the U.S. Constitution and a glimpse of the shifting intellectual trends in political thinking that emerged during the Progressive era. Contrary to the idea that Beard was a moral absolutist interested in denouncing the interference of economic interests in government, this thesis argues that Beard developed a pluralistic, functionalistic, and anti-majoritarian conception of politics that was at odds with many Progressive thinkers. Most previous research on Beard has lacked archival research and has ignored Beard’s teachings on politics at Columbia University, thus projecting into Beard’s thought concepts and values he did not adopt. In this study Beard appears as an early advocate of a new pluralistic ethics and utilitarian morality that allowed him to picture the framers of the Constitution as modern pragmatic politicians interested in creating a strong government by the art of integrating the major economic interests of the society in the process of law-making. This dissertation also reveals a broader intellectual world informing Beard’s scholarly work and highlights his readings in modern sociology at DePauw and German sociological jurisprudence as two key factors in understanding Beard’s conception of law and politics. As such, it offers a much more complicated image of Beard’s thought and his intellectual world.

This thesis examines the place, influence, and deployment of archaic Greek thought in Sophocles’ extant tragedies, paying close attention to the ethical and theological content of the plays as well as to their dramatic and literary fabric. I use archaic thought as an umbrella term for a constellation of ideas on the human condition and the gods which is first attested, in Greece, in Homeric epic, but has a long and variegated existence in other contexts and after the archaic period. The thesis consists of six chapters, divided in two parts. The first part provides a general conceptual framework, which is then applied in the detailed readings of Sophocles constituting the second part. The first chapter examines some of the main texts of archaic Greek thought, and offers an interpretation of it as a coherent nexus of ideas gravitating around the core notions of human vulnerability, short-sightedness, and the principle of alternation. Using the examples of Homer’s Iliad and Solon’s Elegy to the Muses, I argue that the narrative structure of archaic poetry can be used to formulate and “perform” archaic ideas. The second chapter formulates the principal argument of the thesis: that archaic thought is central to the ethical and religious content of tragedy as well as to its dramatic and literary fabric, that is, to the form of tragedy as a complex artefact designed to be performed on stage. I explore possible models for the interaction between archaic thought and literature and tragedy, from Aristotle’s Poetics to recent interpretations of tragedy as a hybrid of other literary and intellectual forms. I then examine the ways in which archaic ideas are deployed and performed in tragedy, both in passages that are explicitly archaic in content and diction, and in the complex interactions of dramatic form and intellectual content. This general discussion is illustrated with preliminary readings of four Sophoclean plays: Ajax, Oedipus Tyrannus, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. The third chapter contextualises the approach adopted in the thesis as a whole by exploring two interpretations of Sophocles in German Idealist thought: Solger’s reading of Ajax and Hölderlin’s reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. It argues that these analyses, albeit under anachronistic conceptual categories such as “the tragic”, seize on some of the fundamental questions of archaic and tragic ethics and theology: the relationship between the human and divine spheres, and the limits of language and human understanding. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I offer detailed readings of Trachiniae, Antigone, and Electra, three plays chosen to reflect the diversity of contexts in which archaic ideas exist in Sophocles. I argue that archaic thought is central to the intellectual and dramatic fabric of all three plays, even though the deployment and emphasis of archaic patterns and ideas differs from one tragedy to the next.

It is both curious and frustrating, given the perennial popularity of the cycle concept in Ancient Greece, that there has not been a single book written devoted to the wide variety of philosophic and historical conceptions bound up with that loosely descriptive designation. This study was originally undertaken to satisfy my own curiosity on the subject. Herein I intend to survey the entire history of the cycle concept in general from about 700 B.C. to the time of Polybius in the second-century A.D. It is intended to be a descriptive as well as an analytical report.

The thesis is an attempt to reconcile contradictions and devise historical meaning from a problematic text. The book is Wilhelm Reich's Character Analysis, first published in 1933. This influential psychoanalytic work embodies both a radical social theory and disturbing authoritarian attitudes. The thesis uses a variety of methodologies, in particular Roland Barthes' techniques for ascribing historical meaning to certain formal qualities of writing. The thesis proceeds from a summary of methodological studies in intellectual history and criticism, including those of I. A. Richards, R. G. Collingwood, and Dominick LaCapra, as well as Barthes, to a description of Character Analysis and its various historical contexts - biographical, social, and intellectual. The thesis relies on the authoritative biography of Reich, by Myron Scharaf, on autobiographical accounts by Reich's wife and son, on other texts in psychoanalytic social theory by Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Georges Bataille, and Max Horkheimer, and on secondary scholarship on the origins of National Socialist ideology. The thesis argues that despite the influence of reactionary tendencies in Reich's personality and cultural and social milieu, Character Analysis remains a valuable work in the development of a convincing theory of liberation.