Recent legal measures within Canada provide students the right to affirm the moral permissibility of lesbian, gay, bi, trans, two-spirited, and queer (hereafter LGBTTQ) identities within any state funded school. Such rights extend even to students in independent religious schools that parents may have chosen precisely because they teach that LGBTTQ desires and practices are immoral. Many, both within Canada and throughout the world, oppose such legal measures as wrongly promoting a controversial moral worldview at the expense of legitimate parental authority. In this study, I consider whether theories of political morality that endeavor to be neutral in justification can justify such measures against moral and religious dissent. I argue that, due to a lack of a genuinely neutral basis from which to build a morally binding theory of justice, the neutralist approach fails, given the resources on offer in the literature.

In this paper, I defend Rawlsian Political Liberalism from the integrity objection. Integrity objectors claim that political liberals unjustifiably exclude certain religious citizens from making use of their religious values when voting upon basic principles of justice and constitutional essentials. I argue, first, that the integrity objection does not apply to political liberalism. Second, I claim that there is a place in the public, political culture for citizens to make use of their comprehensive values. Third, I argue that attempts to reformulate political liberalism to avoid the integrity objection are ultimately unsuccessful.

This work seeks to recover the critical spirit of conservatism and re-emphasize its goal of stability and resilience in society. I will argue that we should strive to view ourselves as deeply dependent and persistently vulnerable beings rather than free, equal, and rational individuals. An understanding of ourselves as embodied and interconnected patternings-in-the-world – res ecologia – will allow us to better recognize a diffuse violence at work in the modern world. I consider the nature of causation and suggest that the internal stability of res ecologia, when disrupted, should be a primary concern when considering the nature of violence and domination. I then invite us to understand the violence and domination arising in modern liberal societies – protocolic modulations – as abstract standardization that ensures efficient synchronization between individuated or atomized actors. Further, I suggest that the rapid modulations of this kind of protocolic domination disrupt the structural causation within and between res ecologia. In chapter five, I begin to show how this kind of violence and domination is manifest in and through the tradition of liberalism by tracing out a shared, underlying dualistic logic that simultaneously individuates and totalizes. In chapter six, I turn to the role of reason in creating freedom and legitimizing violence. Reason is seen to be contributing to both freedom and domination depending upon whether or not it creates resilience within society that resists standardizations. In chapter seven, I argue that the only way to effectively counter the excessive violence within the dualistic logic of liberalism is to cultivate an ethic of mutual support and restraint that invests society with stability and resilience. Finally, I conclude by contending that a resilient society requires intermediate structures and civil enterprises to instill tradition and reciprocal responsibilities in interdependent familial, socio-economic, and religious life. / Graduate / 0615 / jared.giesbrecht@gmail.com

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A study of Christian interpretations of liberalism is important for social theology for two reasons: first, liberalism is the dominant political ideology of modernity, and (especially in the form "liberal democracy") is the most prominent form of public self-definition in the West, its claims often being taken to be self-evidently true. Second, liberalism is historically indebted to Christianity, and the two are susceptible of mutual confusion. A critical theological analysis of liberalism is necessary to ensure the authentically Christian nature of contemporary political theology. This analysis is conducted principally through a discussion of the criticisms of liberalism made by three Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, the American Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), the French Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), and the Canadian George Grant (1918-1988). After an introductory chapter, chapter two presents an interpretation of liberalism, mapping the historical contours and varieties of liberalism from five liberal writers, and elaborating a loose framework of the conceptual structure of liberal thought. Chapter three examines Reinhold Niebuhr's criticisms of liberalism's alleged facile progressivism and optimistic conceptions of human nature and reason, and chapter four looks at George Grant's claim that John Rawls' liberal theory fails to provide the ontological affirmations necessary to defend human beings and liberal values against the dynamics of technology. Jacques Maritain's account of pluralism and the ideal of the secular state, and the contribution he can make to the current debate between liberals and communitarians, are the subjects of chapter five, while chapter six attempts to secure some theological purchase on the issues of Bills of Rights, judicial review, and the constitutional restraint of democratic majorities, with special reference to the British context. In the concluding chapter it is argued that the liberal account of justice is impossible to realize, and that central insights must be borrowed from the Augustinian tradition.

The subject of this thesis is the historical relation between tradition and modernity in Chile in its transition from the XVIIIth century to Independence and its immediate aftermath. In order to study this relation, the thesis begins by analysing the effects that Bourbon reformism —the first attempt to modernize the state institutionally— had in Chile. Special emphasis is placed on the attitude of the ruling èlite vis-à-vis these reforms (Part I). Subsequently, the thesis centres its attention on the last thirty years of Spanish dominion and the repercussions brought about by the collapse of monarchy. Why a traditional society chose liberal-republicanism as a new legitimating order is the principal question analysed in Part II. The last section —Part III— is concerned with the immediate effects produced by this political option, in particular the emergence of a new consolidated government order and nationalist state during the 1820s. How liberal-republicanism reinforced a predisposition towards political change in addition to preparing the ground for further changes is also dealt with in this last part. Finally, the thesis contains an analysis of the main historiographical interpretations which have been put forward concerning Independence. Overall, the dissertation attempts to demonstrate that Chilean Independence is part of a process of long duration of an emancipatory nature, starting in the XVIIIth century, and which entails a gradual change towards modernity. The thesis affirms that a conjunctural change such as Independence, involving basically a political-ideological transformation of the traditional legitimating order, was to be of crucial importance for the later evolution of the country towards a broader form of modernization, even if the latter was not always foreseen or necessarily wanted. The thesis, thus, challenges conventional conservative interpretations which view Independence as a merely epiphenomenal or frustrated revolution, while questioning also voluntarist explanations of a liberal sort which tend to exaggerate the omniscience of the process.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, urban spaces have become increasingly subject to various methods of surveillance and control, especially by physical means. Yet, while 9/11 acted as a catalyst for rapid increases in security measures, the process of securitization has a much longer history. Accordingly, this research looks at how security has been planned and how this has changed over the last four decades in the context of Canada. The dissertation focuses on three Canadian case studies to explore the evolution of security planning: the October Crisis with an emphasis on Montreal (1970), the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vancouver (1997), and the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games. Each case represents a significant moment in Canadian security planning and provides insight into the shifting structure of Canada’s security apparatus. Furthermore, these cases offer a lens into the historical transformations of the Canadian ‘security state’. While the issues and actions associated with these cases cut across local, national, and international scales, the impacts of security measures in each were mostly local and urban. To show how Canadian urban spaces have been transformed and controlled by an evolving security framework, I argue that security planning must be understood as a form of urban planning, although one that remains to be properly acknowledged by the profession or even the academic discipline of planning. Given the democratic claims of liberal planning and its professed concern for the good city, it is therefore significant that the security measures studied in these case studies were implemented without democratic scrutiny but with significant consequences for urban experience. This dissertation tells a story of security planning in Canada, demonstrating how its practices have changed over time in ways that are at odds with liberal political values cherished by mainstream planning.

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During the 1990s within Australia, a regulated industrial relations system which had fostered the growth of collective bargaining and trade unionism was dismantled and replaced by a neo-liberal approach to labour law. During this period trade union membership declined dramatically. Although overall union density has dropped, some unions have managed to arrest membership decline. The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers, Australia and the National Tertiary Education Industry Union have successfully traversed the neo-liberal environment despite having adopted different processes. Through an analysis of both external and internal contingencies of these two successful but different union types, lessons were drawn as to effective forms of unionism. A comparative analysis of the empirical information suggest the benefits of a participative structure and collective ideology to enact a range of activities including industrial, political, solidarity and service. It is through this process that unions have the best possible means to generate alternative methods of social organisation to protect the rights and wellbeing of wage earners within a neo-liberal political economy.

Several recent works have emphasised contemporary hierarchical trends within international society. These trends have been most readily demonstrated by the willingness of dominant states, such as the United States, to conduct interventions in support of the promotion of liberal values and political institutions. Yet while many scholars have identified new relations of hierarchy within international society, few have explored what they suggest regarding international society’s normative constitution or what factors have given rise to these new hierarchies. The end of colonialism in the 1960’s resulted in a fundamental reconstitution of international society. The result of decolonisation was that pluralism, the notion that all states have the equal freedom to constitute their internal socio-political and economic institutions as they see fit, was entrenched as the central constitutive principle of the post-colonial international society. Contemporary hierarchical trends suggest a transition away from this pluralist constitution, with resultant changes in the processes of inclusion and exclusion and modes of interaction between different members of international society. This thesis aims to explore these processes of reconstitution within international society in the post-Cold War era and explain why Western societies have felt compelled to intervene in particular territories in order to promote liberal values. Utilising sociological theories of risk, particularly the work of Ulrich Beck, this thesis suggests that a new ‘liberal social logic of risk’ underpins the emergence of new forms of hierarchy and contemporary constitutional transition within international society. New forms of temporally and spatially de-bounded security risks (such as terrorism), and Western attempts at managing these risks through intervention and the imposition of liberal values in so-called ‘risky zones’, has altered the constitution of international society in a way that gives rise to various hierarchical and anti-pluralist trends.