<p>My dissertation aims to answer two questions: (1) Is democracy epistemically valuable? (2) Is the epistemic value of democracy, if it has any, necessary for justifying its legitimacy? I argue that democracy in certain form can be epistemically valuable. However, I also argue that the epistemic value of democracy is not necessary for justifying its legitimacy. To defend the epistemic value of democracy, I propose a post-deliberation version of Condorcet&rsquo;s jury theorem. I argue that this version of the jury theorem can avoid the common challenges against the classic version. To reject the necessity of epistemic value for democratic legitimacy, I argue that, given that the epistemic value of democracy is subject to disagreement, it cannot be used to justify legitimacy. In addition, I provide a purely proceduralist argument for democratic legitimacy, which appeals to the egalitarian principle that every citizens ought to be equally respected by the state. This argument, if succeeds, shows that the epistemic value of democracy is not necessary for justifying democratic legitimacy. </p>

<p>Public reason theorists argue that it is permissible for the state to enforce political norms, such as laws or constitutional principles, when those norms are acceptable to ?reasonable people.? Reasonable people are neither actual people, with all their flaws, nor are they perfect people; they are rather a partially idealized group ? realistic in some ways and idealized in others. Each of the major public reason theorists ? John Rawls, Gerald Gaus, Jonathan Quong, Joshua Cohen ? idealizes reasonable people to a different degree, but they all share two claims: 1) Reasonable people hold diverse views of the good life. Nevertheless, 2) Reasonable people can all accept basic liberal political norms grounded in freedom and equality. My dissertation begins by arguing that theorists are not free to choose any level of idealization, but are constrained in this choice by the justifications of their theories. In particular, idealization is constrained by one essential part of public reason?s justification, which I call the ?diversity argument.? The diversity argument explains the first element of reasonable people: why do they disagree about the good? The answers, I argue, attributes certain realistic qualities and tendencies to reasonable people, which therefore constrains how much we can idealize them. In chapters on the major public reason theorists, I argue that they all offer a diversity argument that does not match the level of idealization that they employ. As a result, they are unable to show that liberal norms are acceptable to reasonable people, appropriately idealized. In the final chapter, I argue that the mismatch in these theories goes even deeper, which we can see when we ask why we must accommodate disagreement at all. The answers that philosophers have given us ? reasonable disagreement is the inevitable result of human reasoning, human psychology, or free conditions ? also apply to irrational disagreement. Irrational influences such as implicit bias and motivated reasoning are also inevitable results of who we are and how we live, which means we must accommodate these realistic tendencies in political justification. So, if public reason theories must now accommodate disagreement among reasonable-but-sometimes-irrational people, what could be acceptable to all such people? I conclude by suggesting a new direction for public reason theories. People who disagree about the good life, but recognize their common biases, can still justify their views to each other by supporting institutions that mitigate those biases, such as non-discrimination laws and deliberative institutions. This requires a new kind of social contract theory ? one that is grounded in the shared recognition of our limitations, rather than our shared reasons.

<p> This study examines the loss of original principles that distinguish ancient Western philosophy as a valid conceptual framework for political theory and practice. I explore how the Philosophic Tradition as a centuries-old foundation of inquiry and discourse loses its significance and finally its authority in the postmodern world. With the exclusion of metaphysical reflection and reason as a basis for understanding human existential and political phenomena, the transition to Historicism and Philosophic Positivism effectively redefined the nature and application of politics. Critical to this research and serving as a focal point of this study are the works of theorist and originator of the Positive Philosophy, Auguste Comte. I analyze the author's several volumes, these dedicated to establishing a new foundation of political thought, one in which scientific inquiry would serve as the ground for seeking truth and knowledge and as a basis for methodologically directing social and political reorganization. Essentially, Positive politics would as the theorist proposed, be free of abstract speculation (metaphysics) and work to reframe human nature by achieving a universal social state defined by `Order and Progress' and a futuristic system of advancement alike to no other period in human history. As this study examines this prophesy, it takes into view the rise and popularity of the Positive Philosophy from ancient perspectives to modern and postmodern Western thought. It further illustrates the resistance to and eventual replacement of traditional theoretical foundations leaving an indelible imprint on political philosophy which had experienced a profound transformation from its pre-scientific origins. Once as truth-seeking, self-critical and reflective as to moral values and ethical considerations of justice, prudence, and the public good, the Positive Philosophy would serve instead as the ground and authority for, as Comte envisaged, a modification of human existence. Thus politics reformulated was set to task in ordering the social world into its mission of productivity and progress and reconciling its vision of human perfectibility with a proposed end to political conflict.</p>

<p> The emergence of transnational practices of publicity challenges the established political theories of democracy, which presuppose a national citizenry and a national democratic state. The subjects of transnational public spheres lack a common citizenship status to develop legitimate public opinion, as well as corresponding decision-making institutions to address their demands. However, by creating solidarity, building legitimate public opinion and communicating their demands on the base of alternative premises, transnational public spheres defy Westphalian assumptions. The World Social Forum serves as a paradigmatic case: while it develops new types of solidarity "among strangers" through horizontal debate and articulation, it unfolds antagonistic forms of communication with global neoliberal institutions of power. </p><p> This dissertation aims to contribute to the debate on the critical function of the notion of publicity in the context of globalization. Drawing on Habermas's theory of deliberative democracy and Mouffe's democratic theory of "agonistic pluralism," I examine the World Social Forum's forms of communication, creation of solidarity and legitimation of alternative discourses. Agonistic and deliberative theories of democracy have been traditionally regarded as antithetical, since the former stress conflict and dissent, while the latter emphasize dialogue and consensus. However, the analysis of political experiences like the World Social Forum not only shows that both perspectives are not fully incompatible, but also that they are both necessary to grasp the complexity of actual transnational publicity. In particular, I argue that the combination of these theories reveals one of the main characteristics of the WSF: the merging of antagonistic and consensual practices of communication.</p>

<p> This dissertation investigates Platonic political philosophy as a possible means for understanding the relationship between knowledge and power. Via a close reading of Heinrich Meier's early work on Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, it attempts to articulate how political philosophy in Meier's sense works, as well as to carry out <i>in actu</i> a piece of interpretation in accord with its characteristic approach. It finds that Meier "purifies" (<i>kathairo</i>) the figures of Schmitt and Strauss into the exemplars of political theology and political philosophy, respectively; that he traces postmodern relativism back to its roots in a moral-theological view associated with revelation; that he is able in this way to sharpen the distinction between political theology and political philosophy, and, more generally, between the orders of knowledge and of power; and that these orders, despite much obvious interpenetration, are incommensurable in view of their extreme cases. Further, it finds that political philosophy operates in the interrogative mode for questioning the assertions and commands of political and theological authorities, and the hypothetical subjunctive mode for protecting itself, and philosophy generally, from persecution at the hands of such authorities; in addition, it employs these modes to gain insight into its own possibility and necessity, or to progress in self-knowledge. Finally, it finds that political philosophy makes a characteristic turn (<i>periagoge</i>) toward the good, and that this is only justified if the good sticks to the real or if truth is somehow primary or if not everything is possible.</p>

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2007. / "Publication number AAT 3281766"

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1813. Adviser: Richard Schacht. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 262-271) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

The political term "totalitarian" (totaliltario) was coined by Italian Fascism in 1925, and adopted almost simultaneously as a pejorative by the regime's opposition. This language of the Italian stato totalitario was soon adopted by the theorists of National Socialism to describe the German totale Mobilmachung and totale Staat. Postwar discussions continued to categorize Fascism by its own "totalitarian" myth of identity--of the group, race, or nation as self-constituting subject. Some other, more politically ambiguous features, however, may be discerned in fascist discourse than this "totalitarianism" which served as both fascism's narcissistic boast, and its critique. First, fascist rhetoric attempted to exclude those mimetic elements which threatened its presumed autonomy, while repressing its own implicit mimetic structure. The fascist "chameleon" represents the symptomatic re-emergence of this repression, the eruption amid a discourse of identity and autonomy of a personified figure of mimicry and deceit. The first part of the dissertation examines various accusations, denials, and examples of political chameleonism in the writings of Sorel, Gramsci, Gadda, and Malaparte, and confronts this paradigm with that of the fascist "narcissist" or "peacock" (pavone). The camaleonte/pavone relation introduces a discussion of imitation, narcissism, and identification in Freud's theorization of individual and group identity, and leads to a more directly political consideration of the relation between chameleonism, fascism, and democracy. Second, "totalitarian" regimes also characterized themselves as states in motion, referring both their "dynamism" and "modernity," and to their promotion of communication and transportation media. But this term also implies a destructuring kinetic logic contradictory to the totalitarian goal of national identity. The second part of the dissertation describes the ambiguity of political "movement" in Bertolucci's filmic rendition of Italian Fascist architecture, in the Futurist "style of movement," and in the relation between Bewegung and Bewegtheit in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Despite what may be considered the critique of fascism begun in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger's overlooking of the ambiguity of the book's own "movement" illustrates the inconclusiveness of the gesture by which he, as well as those who have formally identified fascism and totalitarianism, have separated their own practice from their historical object.

In contemporary theoretical discourse the concept of responsibility is often found in the intersection of attempts to rethink ethics of difference, enlightened notions of human agency, as well as questions of accountability. This dissertation complicates the terms of these discussions by exploring the meaning and implications of theorizing responsibility politically. In doing so, this study disentangles the question of responsibility from formulations that privilege accountability and from those associated with deconstructive and ontological paradigms. Accordingly, I formulate a critical theory of responsibility that without ceasing to be material and critical and without erasing the “subject,” is responsive to claims of Identity/Difference, otherness, and suffering captures the political dimension of these questions. Responsibility is thus partly redefined as the need to politically respond to a certain predicament both as an individual as a member of different collectivities, face the burdens of acting collectively, and assume the obligations involved as a collected collectivity that is vigilant in relation to the forms of power it generates, as well as of its uses. Stated differently, rather than to approach responsibility only from an ontological, or “analytical” outlook, I propose to look at political responsibility from the perspective of critical theory by considering the historical experience of genocide in the aftermath of Auschwitz. In its conceptual aspect, this dissertation combines careful interpretative work on major political thinkers in the twentieth-century with a critical engagement with the works of anthropologists, historians, literary critics, and philosophers. Chapters on the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, Adorno's dialectical-constellational critical theory, the Great War and the political theory of catastrophe, on the dialectic of enlightenment and its entanglement with late modern despotism and the historical coupling of violence and civilization, the critical import of historicism for a ethico-political historical consciousness, and universal history, frame the bulk of the dissertation. These chapters aim at constituting what Theodor W. Adorno, following Walter Benjamin, called a “constellation” of concepts and narratives that seek to illustrate the complexities of theorizing responsibility politically, without aiming at exhausting the question.

This dissertation explores the import of Lacan's theory in critical cultural studies and examines its special contributions to an understanding of structure, ideology, and identity, especially concerning about relevant issues of ideology and identity in the condition of postmodernity. Although terms of contemporary postmodernism, such as cultural diversity and heterogeneous ideological formation, have entered our language, together with their legal and political imports, many theoretical questions and difficulties in fact still remain. By focusing on the theoretical discussion, this project tries to examine how Lacan's thinking, with philosophical and conceptual nuances, offers an alternative to reconsidering the issues of epistemological questionability and postmodernist skepticism, and the way a structure for him is formed. In addition, Lacan's formulation of psychoanalytic theory is specially illuminating in reading the notions of ideology and identity, since the psychoanalytic notion of unconscious can provide more comprehensive accounts of psychic economy that resides at the deepest level of human reality. As this work presents, Lacanian conceptual tools—such as desire, fantasy, and anxiety—constitute a new plane, a non-discursive dimension beyond the discursive discussions in widespread debates over ideology and identity. In considering cultural phenomenon in contemporary “politics of identity,” this study also investigates the political significance of Lacanian thinking through which current issues on multiculturalism, racism, and fundamentalism can be properly explained.