L'objectif de cette thèse est la comparaison de deux partis politiques en France et en Grèce,de l'UMP et de la ND, tous les deux membres du PPE au parlement européen. Ils représentent dans les deux cas le centre droit et couvre la période de 2002 à 2009.Elle comprend quatre volets : celui de la création de l'UMP et de la ND ; celui de leur organisation ; leur volet idéologique, et ces deux partis face à des échéances électorales, en insistant à chaque fois sur leurs similitudes et leurs différences.En même temps, par le biais de ces deux partis politiques, elle permet la comparaison de deux régimes politiques : de la Ve République Française et de la IIIe République Hellénique, ainsi que les systèmes des élites en France et en Grèce. / The subject of this thesis is the comparison of two political parties in France and in Greece, the UMP and the ND, from 2002 until 2009, both members of the EEP in the European parliament and representing, in both cases, the centre-right.This comparison of similarities and differences between the UMP and the ND is based on four main issues: their creation, their organization, their ideology as well as some electoral campaigns.In the same time, the study of two political parties allows the comparison of two political regimes: the Fifth French Republic and the Third Hellenic one, as well as the elite systems in France and in Greece.

Cette thèse propose une analyse, par le prisme de l’imaginaire social, d’œuvres littéraires québécoises qui mettent en scène la vie économique, depuis la phase d’essor industriel qui marque l’après-guerre jusqu’aux années 1980. Conjuguant l’histoire culturelle et la sociocritique, nous étudions les représentations de la vie économique, leurs conditions de possibilité, de production et de circulation. Notre travail s’intéresse à la dimension idéologique et politique des classes populaires, des ouvriers et des ouvrières fictifs chez des auteurs marginaux (Jean-Jules Richard, Pierre Gélinas, Germain Archambault, Maurice Gagnon et Élisabeth Vonarburg) et d’autres plus connus (Claude Jasmin, Jacques Ferron, Jacques Renaud, Francine Noël). Tout comme la figure de l’écrivain, le personnage du travailleur est un « foyer normatif complexe » (Hamon, 1984). En croisant l’analyse de différentes productions culturelles avec la lecture approfondie de romans choisis, nous interrogeons le présumé désintérêt de la littérature québécoise envers les questions qui concernent la vie économique. Nous tentons d’abord de repenser les catégories de l’histoire littéraire, soit le réalisme, le régionalisme, le « documentaire » et le roman social. Une analyse du discours des écrivains et des critiques dans les périodiques révèle les différentes définitions du rôle social de la littérature et de l’écrivain qui circulent dans les années 1950. La réception contrastée des romans sociaux signale leur qualité littéraire parfois moyenne, mais un enthousiasme pour les représentations du « milieu ». Articulant histoire, politique et travail industriel, les romans de Pierre Gélinas et de Jean-Jules Richard offrent un point de vue informé par une sensibilité communiste sur les grèves ouvrières de l’époque. Dans leurs œuvres, tout comme dans celles publiées à la revue et aux Éditions Parti pris, les représentations des femmes proposent par leur complexité une perspective éclairante sur la vie économique. La figure du chauffeur de taxi, coureur des bois (et des rues) moderne, témoigne exemplairement de l’exploration de la marginalité et de la mobilité qu’on retrouve dans plusieurs parutions de la maison d’édition. Le dernier chapitre s’attache à la figure de la ménagère et à la question du travail ménager. En étudiant Maryse de Francine Noël et Le Silence de la Cité d’Élisabeth Vonarburg, nous réévaluons les présupposés selon lesquels le réalisme serait la forme privilégiée de la représentation économique. / This thesis proposes an analysis, through the prism of the imaginaire social, of literay works that represent economic life, from the industrial boom that marked the post-war period to the 1980s. Combining cultural history and sociocriticism, we study the representations of economic life, their conditions of possibility, production and circulation. Our work focuses in particular on the ideological and political dimension of the working classes and of fictitious workers among marginal authors (Jean-Jules Richard, Pierre Gélinas, Germain Archambault, Maurice Gagnon and Élisabeth Vonarburg) and others who are better known (Claude Jasmin, Jacques Ferron, Jacques Renaud, Francine Noël). As the figure of the writer, the worker is a “complex normative focus” (Hamon, 1984). By crossing the analysis of different cultural productions with the reading of specific novels, the thesis questions the supposed disinterest of Québec literature for economic life. We first attempt to rethink the categories and oppositions of literary history: realism, regionalism, “documentary” and the social novel. An analysis of the discourse of writers and critics in periodicals sheds light on the different definitions of the social role of literature and of the writer circulating in the 1950s discourse. The contrasting reception of social novels indicates the average literary quality of some of those literary works but a certain enthusiasm for social representations. Articulating history, politics and industrial work, the novels of Pierre Gélinas and Jean-Jules Richard offer a marginal point of view on the workers' strikes of the time informed by a communist sensibility. In their works, as in those published in the review and in Éditions Parti pris, the representations of women offer, by their complexity, a significant perspective on economic life. The exploration of marginality and mobility in the publishing house's publications creates the figure of the taxi driver, a modern-day coureur des bois. The last chapter focuses on the figure of the housewife and on the issue of housework. By studying Francine Noël's Maryse and Élisabeth Vonarburg's Le Silence de la Cité, we reassess the presupposition that realism is the preferred form of economic representation.

Media outlets play a pivotal role in the shaping of society's perception on different matters. The research of this thesis consists of 20 articles in total from two of the larger media outlets in the US, CNN and Fox News. Each dataset contains 10 articles consisting of 5269 words, for the former, and 4516 words, for the latter. The analysis categorized how CNN and Fox News utilize linguistic devices when constructing newsworthiness in their depiction on immigration with news values. Both CNN and Fox News exhibited variations in the utilization of news values. CNN emphasized personal narratives, utilizing names and locations, while Fox News leaned towards highlighting elite figures and frequently labeling immigrants as "illegal." These differences in narrative strategies could potentially shape public perceptions of immigration, influencing attitudes and policy discussions. Understanding these media portrayals is critical in comprehending how news influences societal views on this topic and highlights the importance of diverse and balanced media representation in discussions on immigration.

This study explores the rediscovery and development of a tradition of Ciceronian academic scepticism in British philosophy between c.1660-c.1760. It considers this tradition alongside two others, recently recovered by scholars, which were recognised by contemporaries to offer opposing visions of man, God and the origins of society: the Augustinian-Epicurean, and the neo-Stoic. It presents John Locke, Conyers Middleton and David Hume as the leading figures in the revival of the tradition of academic scepticism. It considers their works in relation to those of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Bernard Mandeville, whose writings refashioned respectively the neo-Stoic and Augustinian-Epicurean traditions in influential ways. These five individuals explicitly identified themselves with these late Hellenistic philosophical traditions, and sought to contest and redefine conventional estimations of their meaning and significance. This thesis recovers this debate, which illuminates our understanding of the development of the ‘science of man’ in Britain. Cicero was a central figure in Locke’s attempt to explain, against Hobbes, the origins of society and moral consensus independent of political authority. Locke was a theorist of societies, religious and civil. He provided a naturalistic explanation of moral motivation and sociability which, drawing heavily from Cicero, emphasised the importance of men’s concern for the opinions of others. Locke set this within a Christian divine teleology. It was Locke’s theologically-grounded treatment of moral obligation, and his attack on Stoic moral philosophy, that led to Shaftesbury’s attempt to vindicate Stoicism. This was met by Mandeville’s profoundly Epicurean response. The consequences of the neo-Epicurean and neo-Stoic traditions for Christianity were explored by Middleton, who argued that only academic scepticism was consistent with Christian belief. Hume explored the relationship between morality and religion with continual reference to Cicero. He did so, in contrast to Locke or Middleton, to banish entirely moral theology from philosophy.

Domestic, not foreign affairs drove Soviet policy on Jewish emigration during the period of 1968-1989. This study challenges the prevailing view that fluctuating levels of exit from the USSR were correlated to the climate of relations between the USA and the USSR. The analysis also considers Soviet-German emigration for comparative perspective. Extensive historical background, with special emphasis on Soviet nationality policy is provided.

This thesis is a cultural history of the early Fabian Society, focusing on the decades between 1884, the Society’s inaugural year, and 1914. The canonical view is that ‘Fabianism,’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘doctrine and principles of the Fabian Society,’ is synonymous with State socialism and bureaucratic ‘efficiency.’ By bringing the methods of cultural history to bear on the Society’s founding members and decades, this thesis reveals that ‘Fabianism’ was in fact used as a dynamic metonymy, not a fixed doctrine, which signified a range of cultural, and even literary, meanings for British commentators in the 1890s and 1900s (Part 1). Further, by expanding the scope of traditional histories of the Fabian Society, which conventionally operate within political and economic sub-fields and focus on the Society’s ‘official’ literature, to include a close examination of the broader discursive context in which ‘Fabianism’ came into being, this thesis sets out to recover the symbolic aspects of the Fabians’ efforts to negotiate what ‘Fabianism’ meant to the English reading public. The Fabians’ conspicuous leadership in the modern education debates and the liberal fight for a ‘free stage,’ and their solidarity with the international political émigrés living in London at the turn of the twentieth century all contribute to this revised perspective on who the founding Fabians were, what they saw themselves as trying to achieve, and where the Fabian Society belonged—and was perceived to belong—in relation to British politics, culture, and society (Part 2). The original contribution of this thesis is the argument that the Fabians explicitly and implicitly evoked Matthew Arnold as a precursor in their efforts to articulate a kind of Fabian—latterly social-democratic—liberalism and a public vocation that balanced English liberties and the duty of the State to provide the ‘best’ for its citizens in education and in culture, as in politics.

Through close textual analysis of 20^th century Czech anthropological texts from the Revivalist and Socialist periods and contemporary social research conducted after the Velvet Revolution, I demonstrate certain prominent discourses of identity developed in early Bohemian anthropology and their continuities in present day popular discourses. In each period, identity is deeply intertwined with teleological theories of history with Czech populations at the apex of cultural evolutionary development. In the Revivalist period this apex was believed to be the democratic nation state, transitioning to a Marxist nation state in the Socialist period, and in the contemporary period is conceived of as a neoliberal nation state. A major function of anthropology in the Revivalist and Socialist periods was to legitimate either period’s respective teleological theory and Czech possession of relevant values as 'objective' and 'natural' fact, a general mode of discourse which continued in the contemporary period in numerous editorials in the 1990s on the advantages of capitalism. The contemporary manifestation has particularly noteworthy consequences for the Roma minority, which I argue has provided Czech discourses with an ethnic category 'anti-thetical' to their own identity, providing a 'repository' for negative Czech self-stereotypes emerging from collaboration in the Socialist period.

During the eighteenth century, the dominant rhetorical and explanatory power of civic humanism was gradually challenged by the rise of a new organising language in political economy. Political economic thought permitted radically different descriptions of what laudable private and public behaviour might be: it proposed that self-interest was often more beneficial to society at large than public-mindedness; that luxury had its uses and might not be a threat to liberty and political integrity; that landownership was no particular guarantee of virtue or disinterest; and that there was nothing inherently superior about frugality and self-sufficiency. These new ideas about civil society formed the intellectual basis of a large body of verse written during the long eighteenth century (at mid-century in particular), in which poets engaged enthusiastically with political economic arguments and defences of commercial activity, and celebrated the wealth and plenty of Britain as a modern trading nation. The work of my thesis is to examine a contradiction in the way in which these political economic ideas were handled. Forward-looking and confident poetry on public themes did not develop pioneering forms to suit the modernity of its outlook: instead, poets articulated such themes in verse by appropriating and reframing traditional genres, which in some cases involved engaging with inherited moral values and philosophical preferences entirely at odds with the intellectual material in hand. This inventive kind of generic revision is the central interest of the thesis. It aims to describe a number of problematic meeting points between new political economic thought and handed-down poetic formulae, and it will focus attention on some of the ways in which poets manipulated the forms and tropes they inherited in order to manage – and make the most of – the resulting contradictions.

This thesis delineates the transformation of Iran’s so-called post-revolutionary ‘religious intellectuals’ (rowshanfekran-e dini) from ideological legitimators within the political class of the newly-established theocratic-populist regime to internal critics whose revised vision for the politico-religious order coalesced and converged with the growing disillusionment and frustration of the ‘Islamic left’, a constellation of political forces within the governing elite of the Islamic Republic, that following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini increasingly felt itself marginalised and on the outskirts of power. The historical evolution of this complex, quasi-institutionalised and routinized network, encompassing theologians, jurists, political strategists and journalists, which rose to prominence in the course of the 1990s, and its critical engagement with the ruling political theology of the ‘guardianship of the jurist’, the supremacy of Islamic jurisprudence, political Islamism and all forms of ‘revolutionary’ and ‘utopian’ political and social transformation, are scrutinised in detail. In this vein, the thesis examines the various issues provoked by the rowshanfekran-e dini’s strategic deployment and translation of the concepts and ideas of a number of Western thinkers, several of which played a pivotal role in the assault on the ideological foundations of Soviet-style communism in the 1950s and 1960s. It then moves to show how this network of intellectuals and politicos following the election of Mohammad Khatami to the presidency in May 1997 sought to disseminate their ideas at the popular level by means of the press and numerous party and political periodicals, and thereby achieve ideological and political hegemony. The thesis proceeds to demonstrate the intimate connection between the project of ‘religious intellectualism’ and elite-defined notions of ‘democracy’, ‘electoral participation’, ‘reform’ and ‘political development’ as part of an effort to accumulate symbolic capital and assert their intellectual and moral leadership of the polity.

A critical investigation of the public/private distinction as it has been conceived in Anglo-American political thinking in the second half of the 20th century. A broadly held consensus has developed amongst many theorists that public/private does not refer to any single determinate distinction or relationship but rather to an often ambiguous range of related but analytically distinct conceptual oppositions. The argument of this thesis is that if we approach public/private in the search for analytic or conceptual clarity then this consensus is correct. Against this I propose that a number of the most dominant invocations of the distinction can be understood to express public/private as an irreducibly political dialectic that mediates the relationship between the subjective and objective side of social and political life. By locating these conceptually diverse invocations within a broader and more determinate framework of the historical development and contestation of the boundaries which establish the conditions for subjectivity, as the assertion of political agency, on the one hand, and which demarcate, police and defend these particular boundaries, as part of the objectively given character of social life and institutional organisation, on the other hand, then a more determinate character to public/private can be recognized. I then seek to explore the capacity of this model to capture and explain the peculiar post-war problematisation of public/private amongst a number of new left thinkers in Britain and America.