This paper examines and ultimately objects to a version of political Conservatism as described in Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin’s paper “Analytic Conservatism.” Brennan and Hamlin’s argument makes several claims about economic forecasting and societal risk-aversion that ultimately uphold the status quo within society. This paper examines these claims and refutes them, while also considering counter-arguments Brennan and Hamlin could use to defend their theory. In conclusion, this paper supports the analytic dimension of Brennan and Hamlin’s theory while criticizing the trivial and arbitrary nature of valuing the status quo.

This is a study in supreme command, its nature and the course of its development within the fabric of the English Constitution during the decade or so prior to the shattering of the peace of the old world and the coming of the War in Europe. It is a study concerned with an examination of the formulation and development of defence policy only in so far as these factors helped determine the course and outcome of the struggle, which occurred during these years, to establish an effective form of supreme command. [...]

Between 1900 and 1930, social scientists attempted to refashion social ethics by conducting extensive social research. Some of them collaborated with Herbert Hoover before and after he became president. In the 1920s, they accepted positions on Herbert Hoover's various commissions. The work they did on these commissions made them a forum for manifesting their interest in modernizing social ethics. At one and the same time, they were in a position to define both social ethics and the purpose of the social sciences. Throughout this dissertation, I explore the cases of three social scientists involved with Hoover's commissions: the economist Wesley Clair Mitchell, the political scientist Charles Edward Merriam, and the industrial researcher and social worker Mary van Kleeck. Wesley Clair Mitchell addressed issues of American consumption and economic behaviour. Charles Edward Merriam analyzed the political behaviour of American citizens. Mary van Kleeck surveyed labour relations between American workers and employers. In this dissertation, I have employed methods developed by intellectual historians, focussing on the published and unpublished papers that these social experts and Herbert Hoover himself produced. This collaboration between Hoover and some of the most prominent social scientists of the day explains the ambitious project they undertook, that of adjusting social ethics to the modern living conditions they had discovered while carrying out their social research. In so doing, they sought to adapt the traditional code of conduct of most Americans to the new circumstances that prevailed in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Doctor of Philosophy / The structure of this study of William Liu will closely reflect his ideas and the major historical influences in his life, and will span the period from 1893 through ninety years spent mainly in Sydney, ending in 1983, the year before the beginning of the attack on multiculturalism launched by the historian Geoffrey Blainey. The memorialisation of Liu in the post-Blainey “immigration debate” period will then be considered. The study will also reflect the changes in protest against racially discriminatory immigration policies in Australia, as Liu moved from a period in which his was an almost isolated critique to one in which he was able to embrace the ever-widening group of people opposed to the ‘White Australia Policy’. This process has not been fully examined, perhaps due to the fact that the protest often appeared to have little impact upon policy. But the way in which Liu and other protestors expressed their view of what Australia should be and how the ‘White Australia Policy’ affected this vision sheds a great deal of light on these periods in Australian history. The structure of this thesis around Liu’s life, beginning with a period in which the ‘White Australia Policy’ was widely accepted, and ending in a period in which multiculturalism was entrenched as official policy, emphasises the cultural shift which was brought about by decades of protest against the Anglo-conformist model of Australian identity

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Prior to World War II, the typical American Soldier was young and unmarried. As the old saying in the service went: if they wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued one to you. Today’s servicemember is most likely married and we customarily thank our military families in the same breath as those who wear the uniform. This dissertation is the story of how “support our troops” came to encompass the broader community of military families and how this fundamentally changed the military. Rooted in cultural and gender history, my dissertation argues that changing gender roles in the domestic sphere (i.e., fatherhood, motherhood, breadwinner, and homemaker) had a profound impact on martial roles in the military world, and vice versa. In the postwar era, as domestic roles were beginning to change, more and more married men enlisted in the Army and the Marine Corps, forcing the services to craft policies to accommodate families. Large numbers of married men in uniform was a new development in the United States, and my dissertation shows how marriage transformed civil-military relations. My dissertations addresses questions that are crucial to both the history of the military as well as American cultural life in the second half of the twentieth century. Just as military life became more family friendly, and as the services expanded opportunities for women, far fewer Americans overall chose to share in the burden of national service. Although military policymakers crafted policies to make military life more attractive, they contributed to its further isolation from the broader population by providing generous social services for military families increasingly inaccessible to other American families. Embedded within these contradictions is the story of what it meant to be an American after the Vietnam War. / History

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