Thesis (M.S. in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy)--Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2006. / "14 April 2006." Electronic version of original print document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-77).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The Chartist movement was the mass-movement for constitutional reform in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Chartism is one of the most written about subjects in modern British history, yet the ideas of the movement remain strangely neglected. This thesis tackles this problem by examining Chartist ideas along a broad front. By examining the political thought of a movement, rather than a select number of highly educated intellectuals, this thesis also makes a statement about how to study popular political ideas. Chapter One locates the foundations of Chartist political thought in the movement’s social and cultural context. It asks what the Chartists read and were able to read, how they viewed knowledge and education, and the religious basis of Chartist intellectualism. Chapter Two turns to Chartist political theory, in particular, the Chartist interpretation of the British constitution. It is shown that Chartists drew on a sophisticated conception of the common law that rooted the British Constitution in natural law. Chapter Three considers Chartism’s economic ideas, which, it is argued, must be understood in relation to their understanding of classical political economy. Chapter Four examiners Chartist natural-right arguments alongside the ideas of non-Chartist radicals. Finally, Chapter Five traces the careers of a number of Chartists and the influence of Chartist ideas in America. It also attempts to take account of what Chartism meant to Americans. By considering these topics, this thesis provides a clearer impression of why ideas were important to the Chartists, what sort of ideas the Chartists held, and the legacies of Chartist ideas for democratic politics later in the century.

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From 1919 to 1920 the United States carried out a massive campaign against radicals, arresting and deporting thousands of radical immigrants in a matter of months, raiding and shutting down anarchist printing shops, and preventing anarchists from sending both periodicals and personal communications through the mail. This period is widely known as the First Red Scare, and is framed as a reaction to recent anarchist terrorism, syndicalist unionizing, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Though the 1919-20 First Red Scare was certainly unprecedented in its scope, it was made possible through a longer campaign against radicals, throughout which the US government constructed legal, ideological, and institutional apparatuses to combat radicalism and terrorism. This project explores the longer conflict between the US government and anarchists, focusing on the period between 1900 and 1920. It argues that the government sought to suppress radicalism not just due to anarchist terrorism or class antagonism, but also due to a broader ideology of antiradicalism that framed anarchist counterculture and connected ideas like free love and internationalism as a threat to the nation-state and to traditional American values. In trying to suppress radical counterculture years before the First Red Scare, the US government built its capacity for federal policing. And, by tying the battle against anarchist terrorism to a broader project of suppressing any idea considered to be radical or nontraditional, the US government controlled the kinds of ideas and people allowed within American borders through force, demarcating political limits to American nationality and citizenship.

This project asserts that revolution is characterised by the expression of unthinkable possibilities, and so addresses the paradox implicit in any attempt to "write revolution." That is, how does one represent revolution without reducing it to an ordered term of reference, and thereby subduing its radical character? Additionally, can transformative action be conceptualised as a creative project to which an ethical subject may, and in fact should, be drawn? To answer these questions, my investigation develops in three strands. I combine the radical theory of Alain Badiou with similar affirmations of revolutionary intervention from Slavoj Žižek and Paulo Freire, and so create an aesthetic that affirms revolutionaries as agents of supplementary creativity. My first purpose is thus to establish revolution as a productive enterprise that enables peace, rather than a destructive undertaking that introduces violence. This done, I apply the resultant conceptual tools to literary representations of radical transformation, and demonstrate that my aesthetic enables new readings of the literature of revolution to which it is applied. In the course of my analysis, I also evaluate the suitability of Badiou's ethic as a standpoint from which to engage with literature on revolution. Ultimately, then, the aesthetic I construct not only contests the notion that radical transformation is always destructive, but also renders one sensitive to revolutionary literature's excessive and supplementary dimensions.

Radical Law: Anarchism & Myth in the Poetry of Robert Duncan investigates the relationship between religious and political radicalism in the poetry and poetics of San Francisco Renaissance poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988). I argue that Duncan draws on a nexus of religious and political "heresies" (e.g., Gnosticism, anarchism) to create a complex ethical vision of individual freedom and communal interdependence, what the poet called a "symposium of the whole." As my argument demonstrates, Robert Duncan's mytho-anarchism serves as a critique of twentieth-century political ideology, as well as the cultural politics of such precursors and contemporaries as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov.

This thesis examines the relationship between Henry George and the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic and, detailing the ideological interaction between George’s republicanism and Irish nationalism, argues that his uneven appeal reveals the contours of the construction of Gilded Age Irish-America. The work assesses the functionality and operation, in both Ireland and the US, of Irish culture as a dynamic but discordant friction within the Anglophone world. Ireland’s unique geopolitical position and its religious constitution nurtured an agrarianism that shared its intellectual roots with American republicanism. This study details how the crisis of Irish land invigorated both traditions as an effective oppositional culture to the processes of modernity. The Land War placed Ireland at the centre of a briefly luminous political upheaval that extended far beyond its own shores and positioned the country as a site of ideological conflict at a critical juncture in the history of political thought. Irish nationalism helped to perpetuate a specific aggregation of moral and economic principles, and, in equating British imperial force with the worst depredations of capital, Irish-Americans tapped into a powerful seam in American political culture that universalised the struggle of the Irish tenant farmers. Just as many contemporaries framed Irish politics with the ideals of the American republic, this thesis argues that Irish politics during the Land War, ever more interdependent on its diaspora, is better understood in relation to American political discourse than British.

Quiet Dawn: Time, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Black Radicalism traces the unfulfilled utopian aspirations of the revolutionary past that haunt the present of the African diaspora. Taking its name from the final track on famed black nationalist musician Archie Shepp’s 1972 Attica Blues, this dissertation argues that the defeat of black radical and anticolonial projects witnessed during the turbulent years of the sixties and seventies not only represent past “failures” but also point to a freedom that has yet to arrive. Working at the convergence of literature, performance, and visual culture, Quiet Dawn argues that the unfinished projects of black and anticolonial revolution live on as radical potentialities that linger in the archive like a “haunting refrain.” Quiet Dawn offers a theory the haunting refrain of black sociality that emanates across seemingly disparate geopolitical nodes. The concept of the haunting refrain designates an affective register through which otherwise hidden and obscure regions of the past can be apprehended. The dissertation attends to the traces of black sociality that linger in the archive through an examination of the literary and critical works of black intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Rather than lay claim to political heroes, Quiet Dawn turns to the past in an attempt to give an account of the dispersed social forces that gathered around the promise of a black world. Each chapter offers an example of the haunting refrain of black social life that lingers in the past. In this way, the dissertation as a whole gives an account of the radical potentialities that register as hums, echoes, muted chants, and shadow songs of the “long sixties.” Quiet Dawn contributes to scholarship on black internationalism and intervenes in current critical debates around race, gender, and sexual violence in the fields of black studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies. Its theorization of black social life as a spectral presence is an attempt at attending to the other others that haunt contemporary critiques of power which merely seek redemption in an irredeemable world. To be sure, this project strikes neither an optimistic nor pessimistic note. Rather, it is rooted in the belief that there are infinite amounts of hope that we have yet to apprehend.