This thesis examines the interrelationship between the concepts of evolution, scepticism and conservatism in the thought of Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992). It argues that the concept of evolution plays a vital role in Hayek's epistemology and social philosophy. It proposes that Hayek's understanding of the concept of evolution shaped his early writings on theoretical psychology and the formation of the mind. He subsequently developed his initial ideas in a more systematic way and discussed them in more depth in his writings on the epistemology and methodology of the social sciences. Hayek maintained that the underlying mechanism of the formation of mind and society is the mechanism of evolution. From Hayek's point of view, the human mind and human society have simultaneously evolved through the process of evolution over millions of years. Hayek offered his evolutionary approach as an alternative to 'constructive rationalism'. The thesis argues that Hayek's evolutionary approach led him to adopt a scepticism about the role of reason in society. Hayek maintained that reason itself is the result of human civilization, a civilization that became possible due to rules and traditions that cannot be justified a priori. Hayek's scepticism about the role and capacity of abstract reason and his emphasis on social institutions and traditions had placed his position close to conservatism. Although Hayek rejected any relation between his ideas and conservatism, this thesis tries to show why such a reading of Hayek's political thought is plausible. After identifying three doctrines of conservatism, i.e. scepticism/pessimism, traditionalism and organicism, this thesis argues that there are some significant similarities between Hayek's political thought and conservatism.

In this thesis, I study the use of regulation as a redistributive policy and its implications on economic and political outcomes. In the first chapter of this thesis, I remark that regulation has distributive and welfare consequences, making it a powerful political tool. I show that when the regulation is on goods for which all of the citizens have similar consumption behaviour, a highly unequal society funds the costs of those goods mostly through general taxation; instead of tariffs charged to users. Importantly, when the poor have access to only the essential goods in the economy, regulation becomes a strong political tool, and it is poverty rather than inequality that determines the use of regulation. In the second chapter, I start with the observation that corporations devote costly efforts to gain access to candidates before elections. These pre-electoral attempts take many forms and commonly result in a welfare loss. Then, I explore the consequences of the access of a monopolistic firm to a candidate on the regulatory policy. I show that when the firm transfers a private interest to a popular candidate, regulation results in gains for both the firm and the candidate; and a welfare loss for the voters. Instead, this welfare loss does not take place when the firm uses campaign contributions as signals to communicate private information. From this perspective, there are benefits in permitting interest groups to fund political campaigns. The third chapter is motivated by the fact that developing countries subsidise the tariffs of public utilities such as electricity or transportation with high costs in terms of the quality and sustainability of the utility provisions. Even when governments repeatedly claim that the main goal of these subsidies is to improve the well-being of the poor, most literature has explained the use of these tools is driven by income inequality rather than the poverty rate. In contrast, I study the effect of the size of the poor on the choice of the mix of regulation and other traditional forms of redistributive policy. I begin by showing that the poor are better characterised by their consumption bundle than their income. Consequently, when the public utilities are essential for the poor, a higher poverty rate leads to a larger amount of subsidies to utilities and a smaller size of income redistribution.

This thesis examines the emergence of contentious forms of political agency during the Libyan uprising of 2011. The wave of popular protests known as the ‘Arab Spring’ challenged prevailing assumptions about the politics of the region. It was argued that, through their unfettered, claims making practices, Arab publics had undermined authoritarian structures of power, and become imbued with new, empowering self-understandings. Positioning itself within this literature on Middle East politics, the thesis sets out to analyse authoritarianism as a mode of domination, and to investigate the extent to which moments of radical contestation both transform authoritarian regimes and generate new political subjectivities. The analysis is centred on the Libyan uprising, which emerged under Qadhafi’s authoritarian Jamahiriya, yet witnessed widespread protests, civil activism and an armed conflict from February to August 2011. The thesis integrates multi-institutional politics theory with theories of contentious politics in order to conceptualise domination as located in social ‘institutions’ that are simultaneously material and symbolic. In turn, it understands agency as a strategic and symbolic representational practice that is capable of transforming institutional structures. Drawing on interviews with Libyan activists, and on the analysis of social movement discourses, the thesis advances three core arguments. Firstly, it argues that Qadhafi’s Jamahiriya embedded political agency into its system of domination by engendering complicity. Secondly, it argues that in 2011, Libyans undercut the Jamahiriya’s monopoly over meaning and practice by generating mobilising ‘collective action frames’, and by subverting its symbolic and classificatory schemas. Lastly, it indicates that representational practices ultimately struggled to transform authoritarian domination because they were bound up with the strategic logics of collective action, and because they re-inscribed the Jamahiriya’s definitions of power and collectivity. In proffering these arguments, this thesis generates a new body of empirical material on an understudied case, and critically applies, challenges and extends theories of authoritarianism and contentious politics.

The aim of this research is to reconstruct a metaphysical interpretation of the philosophy of history with regard to the spirit of historical thinking. The spirit of historical thinking is to emphasize the relation between what happened in the past and historical thinking about the past in the present. However, current philosophies of history, which are largely epistemologically oriented, have not adequately explored this relation. In order to investigate the relation between past and present, I refer to an Aristotelian philosophy of practice and politics, and adapt it to the domain of the philosophy of history, and argue the case for a metaphysical science of history. A metaphysical science of history contains two primary parts. They are the part on physis and the part on technê/phronēsis. With regard to physis that metaphysically investigates the natural generating progress of entities, I argue that the existence of historical events can be understood as a natural developing progress in which the events are ordered in a chronological sequence. Such chronological sequence is essentially the physis of history in the metaphysical sense (I characterize it as ‘Ordnungszeit’). For the part on technê/phronēsis, I demonstrate that Aristotelian knowing is for itself an action of knowing, which is located beyond a given temporal position in the past to both the past and the thinking present, and indicates the fundamental Beingness of history (I characterize it as ‘Geschehenszeit’). Finally I conclude that the historical eudaimonia, namely the pursuing of the completeness of historical knowledge, is the final presentation of actualizing Geschehenszeit, as it bridges the past and the present in accordance to the spirit of historical thinking.

No theory of social change can circumvent the task of specifying the process that transforms the existent order into a different order, and determining that which accounts for the difference between those two orders. This thesis examines whether the theories of social change found in the works of Alain Badiou and Ernesto Laclau succeed in fulfilling this task. Badiou contends that a political process transforms the situation in which it unfolds in so far as what it produces is a ‘truth’. Certain implications of the set-theoretical ontological discourse through which Badiou conceptualizes truths, however, prevents an unambiguous appraisal of their socially transformative character. Although Badiou stipulates that the transformative potential of a truth lies in its ‘generic’ universality, this universality becomes indistinguishable from particularity when its transformative effects are limited to a situation—but it is precisely the interplay between situations, in the plural, that is not adequately reflected in set-theoretical ontology. Whilst Laclau’s theory of hegemony can be interpreted as providing an account of this interplay between pluralities of situations, it has its own shortcoming: the transition between different social orders cannot be thought under hegemony theory as anything other than a transition wherein the to-come is conditioned by the present to an extent that is theoretically underdetermined, resulting in the blurring of the distinction between social transformation and social reproduction. The final part of this thesis explores the possibility of bringing together the Laclauian notion of the ‘simplification’ of the social space through hegemonic articulation and Badiou’s theorization of truth procedure, in an attempt to conceive the particular kind of situation in which a political process would potentially have far-reaching socially transformative consequences.

The core argument of this work is that the individualist conceptions of agency and responsibility inherent in the contemporary ethical structure of international relations are highly problematic, serve political purposes which are often unacknowledged, and have led to the establishment of an international institutional regime which is limited in the kind of justice it can bring to international affairs. Cosmopolitan liberalism has led to the privileging of the discourse of rights over that of responsibility, through its emphasis on legality and the role of the individual as the agent and subject of ethics; this has culminated in the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC, described by its supporters as the missing link in human rights enforcement, is a result of changing conceptions of agency and responsibility beyond borders – normative discourse has moved from state to individual, from politics and ethics to law, and from peace to justice, but I argue that it has not yet moved beyond the dichotomy of cosmopolitan and communitarian thinking. I contend that neither of these two positions can offer us a satisfactory way forward, so new thinking is required. The core of the thesis therefore explores alternative views of agency and responsibility – concepts which are central to international political theory, but not systematically theorized within the discipline. I outline models of agency as sociality and responsibility as a social practice, arguing that these models both better describe the way we talk about and experience our social lives, and also offer significant possibilities to broaden the scope of international justice and enable human flourishing. I end the research by considering the implications of these more nuanced accounts of agency and responsibility for ongoing theorising and practice.

This thesis addresses the "air of paradox" that continues to plague Kant's absolute prohibition of revolution. In seeking to identify the source of this contention, I investigate a possible inconsistency within Kant's Doctrine of Right as a doctrine of external freedom. Taking my lead from Christine Korsgaard's idea of ―perverted justice‖, I explore the idea that states can exist that undermine their own purpose, in their denial of the freedom which is their end. Establishing the possibility of perverted justice takes us into an inquiry into the nature of Kant's moral theory as a theory of freedom, and specifically, the particular kind of freedom that Right takes as its end. I take the contrast between the ethical and juridical domains as my point of departure, defending Kant's strict division between the two domains. In doing so I defend the moral status of Right against commentators who exclude it on grounds of its external nature, arguing for a conception of practical freedom that is broader than the internal freedom of autonomy, and hence can include Right under its scope. From this I offer an account of external freedom as acting in accordance with the Universal Principle of Right, which is nothing more than the constraint of one's choice under universal law. In conclusion, I argue that Right (justice) cannot be frustrated in the way that Korsgaard's idea of perverted justice suggests, due to the formal nature of external freedom. Obedience to positive law cannot deny external freedom in the way she suggests; rather, our constraint under law is constitutive of our freedom as the end of political society. There is therefore no inconsistency to be found within Kant's Doctrine of Right between the idea of external freedom as the end of Right and his absolute prohibition of revolution.

This thesis offers a constructivist framework to set out political features in capitalist diversity that the current literatures on „Varieties of Capitalism‟ and „Comparative Capitalisms‟ have not fully shed light into so far. Taking these scholarly contributions as a starting point, I argue that their investigations are able to highlight the distributional outcomes in terms of which actors relatively benefit from a particular socio-economic setting. However, that they have difficulties to point to the political aspects of different models of capitalism that relate to their constitutive nature. I then suggest a method that is able to underline how the very understandings of the individual economic subject and of the state are themselves political as their definitions marginalise alternatives ways to make sense of these economic concepts. Starting from the indeterminacy of the human mind and the theoretically many ways to interpret the lived environment according to sets of „naïve theories‟, it builds on the recent developments in constructivist institutionalism to present an account that puts the individual-state relationship at its core. As such, it breaks with the focus on production prevalent in the literature, and enables analysis of the normative depiction of a particular ideal-typical type of economic subject that then engages with consumer markets. What becomes essential is the exact ways in which a particular understanding of the state in the eyes of policy-makers leads to the facilitation of certain definitions of economic agency and market mechanisms, and the exclusion of their alternatives. The empirical chapters then apply this framework to the cases of the British and German home ownership and mortgage markets (1997-2007) to explore the discursive framing patterns that were put forward to legitimate a particular definition of the ideal-typical home owner and mortgagee in these two economies. Through the study of parliamentary debates, the findings demonstrate not only that differences exist in the conceptualisations of the economic subject, but hence also the political character of such differences as excluding each other. At the same time, such a process is shown to be deeply political in terms of the policy instruments that are not considered due to particular taken-for-granted conceptions of policy-makers themselves. In short, this constructivist account showcases the multiplicity of political aspects with regards to state interventions in contemporary capitalist economies.

Is there a causal link between corrupt machine politics and informality? Historical and empirical evidence support a positive answer to this question. The first paper offers a theoretical perspective, which more generally asks how redistributive politics in a democracy affects the allocation of factors in a dual economy with a modern and a traditional sector. A model of electoral competition with endogenous group size and output shows that electoral political agency through targeted redistribution (sector-specific tax rates) can either promote or discourage the growth of the modern sector. However, the effect of changes in sector size on total output is ambiguous and depends on parameter combinations. These insights contrast with traditional models in redistributive politics in which group sizes are exogenous and allocation effects are overlooked. In this framework, economic forces at work that come from productivity differentials and endowment distribution are able to outweigh the effects of the ideological density. The second paper explores evidence from 64 democracies through an instrumental variable approach. The hypothesis is that machine politics shapes institutional quality in democracies and thereby determines informality. The conceptual framework is based on the political exchange space and the portfolio theory of electoral investment. Machine politics is proxied by electoral risk, and institutional quality is measured by the index of the rule of law. Instruments of machine politics are searched for among de-jure political institutions. This analysis confirms results already discussed in the related literature on government quality, determinants of informality and the effect of electoral rules on corruption, however, the main contribution of this research is to bring political structure into the picture, here the party system, insofar as it is a key intermediating mechanism between political institutions (de-facto and de-jure) and social outcomes (political and economic). In other studies the political structure is a black box that readily disappears when estimating reduced-form equations.

Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy (PML) is caused by lytic infection of oligodendrocytes by JC Virus (JCV). JCV Encephalopathy (JCVE) is a newly identified disease characterized by JCV infection of cortical pyramidal neurons. JCVCPN was isolated from the brain of a JCVE patient. JCVCPN contains a unique 143 base pair deletion in the agnogene and has an archetype-like regulatory region (RR), of the type typically found in the kidneys. In this dissertation, we studied the JCVCPN virus to better understand the role of the agnogene and the RR in JCV replication. We used kidney, glial and neuronal cell lines to compare the replication of JCVCPN to the prototype virus JCVMad-1. JCVCPN was able to replicate viral DNA in all cell lines tested, but was unable to establish the high level of infection seen with JCVMad-1. Levels of VP1 capsid protein were undetectable in JCVCPN transfected cells, and few infectious virions were produced. JCVCPN did not have a replication advantage in the neuronal cell line tested. To determine if the agnogene deletion or the archetype-like RR was responsible for the observed phenotype of JCVCPN, we generated a series of chimeric viruses between JCVCPN and JCVMad-1. We found that the phenotype of JCVCPN was due predominantly to the deletion in the agnogene, in particular the loss of the DNA and not the lack of a full length agnoprotein. To further study the role of the agnogene DNA in JCV replication, we introduced a series of small agnogene deletions into a virus with a start codon mutation which prevents agnoprotein expression. We characterized the replication of these additional mutants and found that nucleotides 376-396 are crucial for the expression of VP1 capsid protein. Previous studies have provided evidence for the binding of host cell proteins to the agnogene DNA. We used DNA-Immunoprecipitations with the agnogene to identify candidate binding proteins, but were unable to confirm any candidate proteins as binding specifically to the JCV agnogene. Studying this naturally occurring pathogenic variant of JCV provided a valuable tool for understanding the functions of the agnogene and RR form in JCV replication.