My dissertation examines the difference between European and American forms of alienation. My thesis is that while European forms of alienation tend to arise out of an ideology (that of bourgeois culture) that disparages the material world, encouraging an attitude of resignation toward the established order, American forms of alienation tend to arise out of an ideology (that of the frontier) that disparages the social world, encouraging an attitude of rugged individualism which also results in an attitude of resignation toward the established order. Thus, both forms of alienation end up affirming the given order, but in very different ways. These different ways should affect how social theorists analyze American culture and help them avoid totalizing analyses that blur the distinctions between American and European cultures. In order to comprehend the nature of alienation in post-1945 American society, I trace three forms of alienation from three spaces of possibility: that of (1) European bourgeois culture; (2) the American frontier; and (3) the American counterculture. These three spaces are examined successively in each chapter of this dissertation. In the "Introduction" I provide a general overview of the project, explaining its origins and significance. Then, I delineate the scope of this project, offer provisional ways of understanding of "alienation," "alienation in the European context," and "alienation in the American context," and discuss how my dissertation employs the metaphor of "space." Chapter One uses Herbert Marcuse's work to analyze the European space of possibility found in bourgeois culture. The first part of the chapter presents a general overview of Marcuse's thought. Here, I examine: Marcuse's "humanistic" reading of Marx, as found in "The Foundations of Historical Materialism"; the difference between Marcuse's interpretation of Marx and the "standard" mechanistic reading, including a discussion of Marcuse's criticisms of reductionist use of the base and superstructure model of historical materialism; and Marcuse's analysis of the revolutionary status of the proletariat under twentieth century conditions. The second part of Chapter One uses Marcuse's article "The Affirmative Character of Culture" to provide an account of bourgeois culture. This article, which describes affirmative culture as simultaneously regressive and progressive, provides the general framework for the entire dissertation. Chapter One ends with a discussion of One-Dimensional Man, where Marcuse provides his most detailed analysis of post-War culture. Here, I ask if there is a "refuge of hope" even in what is usually considered Marcuse's most pessimistic work. Chapter Two presents the nineteenth century American space of possibility, the frontier. I begin with Frederick Jackson Turner's and Jean de Crevècore's analyses of the American frontier as constitutive of the American character. Then, I move to a study of the material and ideological conditions underlying the culture of the frontier: the enclosure of the commons and the Protestant work ethic. Next, I ask if Marcuse can provide an analysis of American culture as distinct from European culture, and ask if we may consider Marcuse an "American philosopher." The chapter ends by considering the work of Paul Goodman, who provides an alternative understanding of American possibility, from the point of view of a native inculcated from birth with an American worldview. Chapter Three examines the central twentieth century American space of possibility, the counterculture. The first two parts of this chapter provide general histories of the American New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and the American counterculture of the same period. Here, I focus on how these movements interacted and how they were responding to similar experiences of alienation. Then I examine the primary material basis for both movements, which I take to be post-War economic expansion. The final two sections of Chapter Three attempt an interpretation of the American counterculture and the New Left through the use of Marcuse's aesthetic theory. The "Conclusion" restates the general argument of the dissertation, now with all of the details in place, examines two other reactions to alienation, political rollback and religious revivalism, asks what spaces of possibility may be emerging in the twenty-first century, and proposes some avenues for further research.

Thesis advisor: Peter Skerry / The most important political fault line in American politics today is marked by the postwar liberal consensus itself. What is often overlooked, however, is that both liberals and anti-liberals assume a modern, progressive view of history in which the world is growing up to become more secular, technologically advanced, and egalitarian. Liberals celebrate this trajectory as they see themselves “on the right side of history.” They consider their opponents backward holdouts or, more generously, those not yet enjoying the goods of modern life. Anti- liberals on the right see the world according to liberalism proceeding apace to undo traditional morality, globalize economies, automate jobs, replace the nation-state, and undermine cultural norms. A nostalgic politics of reaction aspires to reverse the course of history and return to an unmolested golden age. In the words of one recent variation on this theme, only such a reversal can “Make America Great Again.” This dissertation offers intellectual portraits of three American social critics: Christopher Lasch, Paul Goodman, and Jane Jacobs. Each was a critic of progressive habits of mind in different ways, but all three offer an alternative to the progressive optimism and nostalgia for the past at work in today’s debates. If, then, these thinkers were reactionaries in resisting progressive programs of their times, they were enlightened reactionaries insofar as they rationally resisted the deeper assumption of inevitable progress that animates both left and right. While I address a specific concern in the work of each writer, I draw out three points common to their thought. First, each thinker dissolves the dichotomy between past and future that is central to progressive history. The progressive view of history shared by liberal and anti-liberal alike points toward, alternatively, an inevitably improved future or a past that is slipping away. Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs, however, point to the continuity of past and future and resist subsuming the present in a deterministic account of history. Second, the thought of each embodies a defense of tradition – historically conditioned ways of knowing, as opposed to supposedly trans-historical universal reason. That defense is expressed not only in each thinker’s view of the past as a resource for the present, but in his or her resistance to the very idea of an Archimedean point that is assumed by claims to have seen the end of history. Indeed, each thinker’s arguments are presented explicitly as part of a tradition, and the work of each points to the importance of tradition as an indispensable lens on the world. Each author shows how the assumption of progress, despite progressives’ claims to have escaped tradition, does not reflect an inescapable law of history but is itself part of a modern tradition that we are free to modify. This in turn points to the political possibilities of recovering tradition as the basis of common discourse. To the extent we are conscious of the decisive role of tradition, we will be aware of the degree to which we are responsible agents: responsible for the contingent way we see the world, and for the contingent choices made by the light of our traditions. Finally, I argue that Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs’s use of tradition stands in contrast not only to transcendent, objective reason but also to an understanding of traditions as closed language games, coherent in themselves but rationally inaccessible to one another. Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs present a view in which traditions are dynamic, self-correcting, ongoing arguments within and between themselves. Their use of tradition-bound arguments to develop counter-traditions against dominant progressive perspectives exemplifies the way in which traditions might confront and correct one another. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

abstract: This dissertation makes the case to reclaim the typically negative term, coterie, as a poetic method and offers the epithalamium as a valuable object for the study of coterie conditions and values. This examination of the historical poetics of the epithalamium shows how the form was reappropriated by gay postwar poets and those in related social circumstances. This study applies and builds on theories developed by Arthur Marotti (John Donne: Coterie Poet), and Lytle Shaw (Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie) and subsequent critics to develop a coterie poetics, the markers and terms for which I have arranged here to demonstrate conscious "sociable" poetics. It is thus to our advantage to study coterie conditions and methods to open readers to insights into twentieth-century poets that have deliberately exploited reception among those in private and public spheres, just as their Early-Modern precursors did--often as a matter of survival, but also as formative practice. The key figures in this study wrote significant epithalamia or made major theoretical claims for coterie poetics: John Donne (1572-1631), W. H. Auden (1907-1973), Paul Goodman (1910-1972), and Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). O'Hara's poetry is approached as the apex of coterie poetics; his personal immediacy and obscure personal references should alienate and exclude--yet, they invite. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012