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The object of this thesis is the examination of the concept of political representation in the corpus of Hobbes, Locke, Hegel and Marx. Through the method of textualreconstruction I foreground the concept's salience in their writings. Political representation constitutes a unitary political society as the basis of representative government by entrusting to a separate part of the political community the exercise of the legislative and executive functions on behalf of the political society. Hobbes's author-actor model grounded the concept of political representation by introducing the act of the transfer of will to a representative by authorisation. Thereby he established the problematic relationship of permanently alienated, absolute, representative power acting in the name of the political community. Locke conceptualised political representation in a way that restored to political society the power to determine the legitimacy of its representative government in case the latter transgressed the norm of acting for the public good of society. Hegel, in turn, assigned to political representation the crucial function of integrating civil society into the power system of the state thus securing the identity of subjective and objective freedom in the rational state, though political representation bestows only formal freedom to civil society's involvement in the affairs of the state. For Marx, the relationship of political representation makes the representative polity appear as a democratically governed political society within which individual freedom and the public good are secured. This is vitiated by the rift between political society/state and civil society. Marx censures liberal and republican theory for ignoring the primacy of civil/bourgeois society over the representative political society. As a consequence,he argues,the representative polity is not a form of self-government but other-determined and neither freedom nor the public good are realised. Instead, under the regime of private property, money assumes the authorial function of organising social exchange and human relations, shaping the representative polity after its own image, and thus it renders democracy as popular sovereignty a lie.

Based on fieldwork carried out in Delhi during 2006-2007 this thesis explores the social world of transparency and accountability activism in the city. I focus in particular on the activism scene that has grown up around the campaign for and implementation of the national Right to Information Act 2005. There is a global interest in improving the transparency and accountability of government bureaucracies, and in schemes to foster active citizenship. In tune with this campaigns to provide Indian citizens with a right to access government information have captured the imagination of activists, policy makers, and national and international donor organisations. For transparency and accountability activists rights to access government information offer Indian citizens opportunities to interrogate official procedures and hold officers individually accountable; to provide people with mechanisms with which they might become more ‗active‘ as citizens; and to provide a means of monitoring the performance of the state in fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities regarding welfare, equality and social justice. Taking boundaries as my theme my work looks at the activist scene in Delhi from an ethnographic perspective, investigating how activist projects work. I argue that the ideology and practice of transparency and accountability activism is concerned with boundaries in two ways. First it is directed at illuminating and delineating boundaries between the state and society, and public and private roles. The intention is to combat the effects of private influence and unofficial practices that might lead to the misallocation of government resources. Second it is directed at transcending social and spatial boundaries based on class, caste or community in order to enrol people into projects aimed at producing empowered and active citizens. However, in looking at the activist scene a number of what I call ‗boundary paradoxes‘ become apparent. Activist campaigns to get transparency and accountability legislation passed rely in part on the personal connections to the highest levels of government of activists from India‘s social elite. At the grassroots level activists play a mediating role between the local state and poor or illiterate clients. Social and cultural capital, space, class and gender distinctions emerge as significant factors in the everyday practice of activism, in turn reproducing existing social hierarchies in activist organisations. While seeking transparency and accountability from others activists have to negotiate the boundaries of transparency and accountability in their own organisations, deciding what can be made public and what should remain hidden. And, as activism is organised through informal networks sustaining a livelihood and a full time role in the scene immerses activists in webs of patron-client relations, recommendations and obligations, the antithesis of the disciplined, transparent and accountable bureaucratic organisation that transparency and accountability activism requires from the state. My thesis contains examples of the positive effects that involvement in activism can have, particularly for people from some of Delhi‘s poorer neighbourhoods. However, although activism is directed at producing a future that conforms to activist‘s ideal constructions of how India should be, activists must work in the present to bring this future about. I argue that even as activists work for change, activism itself is a site in which the existing structures of society are reproduced.

The aim of this study is to show how liberal thinkers have responded to the problems liberalism as an ideology faces in Russia, and to the challenges which Russia is encountering as a country in transition. I will argue that liberals are constantly aware both of their marginalisation (which is seen as being cultural, historical and political) when they react to other ideologies and to those who hold political power, and also of the difficulty of shaping Russia's future along liberal lines. The liberal response to nationalism, therefore, provides a useful model in showing how liberals have reacted to ideologies which are typically regarded as being outside the liberal movement in Russia and also how they have sought to respond to many of the central questions relating to transition. I will show in this study that the response of liberals towards nationalism demonstrates a huge increase in the diversity of the liberal movement from the mid 1990's onwards, as the internal divides amongst liberals have become apparent under the impact of transition. Secondly, liberals have been torn between the possible strategic benefits of combining liberalism with non-liberal elements, weighed against the ideological problems these combinations cause. These dilemmas have left Russian liberalism as an essentially stagnant ideology which remains incapable of forming a united and coherent response both to its own marginalisation and to the challenges faced by Russia.

This thesis argues that despite the proclamations within the sociological field of 'late modernity', socialism is still of great relevance as both a form of critique, and as an alternative political model. Nevertheless, such an argument requires a refinement of both of the key terms. Firstly, via discussing the work of the three most prominent sociologists of late modernity (Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens), this thesis argues that there have been significant changes with the shift to 'late' modernity, most notably the, contested, emergence of 'individualization'. I discuss how the 'disembedded individualization' favoured by Beck and Giddens is flawed empirically. However the 'embedded individualization' developed by Bauman and other researchers is a much more faithful depiction of the continued inequalities and privatisation of previously collective political concerns within late modernity. Using such a distinction can demonstrate the flawed nature of the political alternatives offered by Beck and Giddens and can, potentially, open the door to an alternative socialist conception. This socialist alternative also has to be reconsidered. To do this I draw upon a tradition of 'libertarian' socialism, best elaborated in the work of Emile Durkheim and G.D.H. Cole. This focuses upon the development of internally democratic associational groups as forum for individuals to express their functionally differentiated desires. I argue that this model has great potential for a period of individualized late modernity. It is also my claim that elaboration of such a project can be a criticism against the suggestion that there is a natural 'fit' between neoliberal capitalism and late modernity. In short, socialism, when defined as a libertarian form has the potential to be both a form of critique concerning the role of the state and market under late modernity, as well as providing a possible alternative.

Using primary material, much of which has been overlooked up to now, this thesis argues that the Iskra newspaper and its organisational appendages were conceived by Lenin and his closest collaborators in a pragmatic attempt to strike a balance between the theoretically authoritative and revolutionary, yet inactive Osvobozhdenie Truda and the more active, but reformist and theoretically unclear Rabochee Delo grouping. As such, Iskra does not appear to have been the product of a detailed plan conceived in Siberian exile, as is often thought. Nor did it represent the extreme left wing of the Russian social-democratic movement of the time, a place occupied by Osvobozhdenie Truda. Iskra and its supporting organisations formed a faction of a broader party, the RSDLP, whose institutions it aimed to rebuild and to which it aimed to give ideological leadership broadly in sympathy with the basic views of Plekhanov, though differing with him in terms of tactics. Starting from a position of weakness both in the emigration and inside Russia, Lenin at first sought an alliance with the 'Economists' of Rabochee Delo rather than a policy of open factional struggle, which was at this stage (1900-01) advocated by Plekhanov. Only when serious vacillations in the Rabochee Delo line started to emerge in the spring of 1901 did Lenin break with this tactic, in despair of any useful co-operation with the politically unstable followers of the economist journal. From the end of 1901an open struggle for the support of the RSDLP local committees inside Russia began, in which the Economists were unable to martial support, whilst Iskra, owing to its network of full-time 'agents' and their assistance, eventually won a dominant position. On this basis, plans were laid for a Second Congress of the RSDLP that reveal a distinctly democratic and pluralist conception of party organisation on the part of Lenin, A conception which does not square with his dictatorial reputation. Accordingly, this thesis argues that the Second Congress was a credible, if not perfect representation of rank and file opinion within the RSDLP at the time and that the split within the Iskra faction that took place at this meeting owes more to pre-existing tensions with the Russian Iskra organisation rather than any unreasonable behaviour on the part of Lenin. Specifically, individual agents showed signs of weariness in relation to Lenin‘s policy of factional struggle prior to the Second Congress. For this reason they sought, but failed to find compromise at the congress with the Bund and the economists, and as such provoked a split with the supporters of Lenin within Iskra. As such, it was actually an inopportune search for compromise which appears to have provoked the split within Iskra, rather than dictatorial or intolerant practices on the part of Lenin. The supporters of Martov assumed that the Bund and the supporters of economism could be appeased, but this was not in fact the case.

This thesis begins by complicating classical understandings of the public sphere and focusing on the ways in which loosely aligned protest groups communicate agonistically across difference. It argues that the organisational systems and structures of coalition movements enable activists to accommodate very differently orientated protest positions and explores the ways in which coalition activists attempt to preserve political solidarity across difference. It then goes on to examine the ways in which coalition movements attract and then maintain the attention of wider publics. It suggests that coalition protest movements unsettle and renegotiate the boundaries which have traditionally constituted the public sphere and considers the political potential inherent in the fractured and fractious spaces which exist between the political margins and the mainstream. These intertwined arguments are organised around an examination of the protest strategies of various grass roots movements. These include groups which have retrospectively been characterised as coalitions such as the women's peace movement and the anti-Criminal Justice Bill movement as well as those which are currently defined as coalitions such as the anti-globalisation movement and the anti-war movement. This research utilises a wide range of research methods including participant observation, content analysis, semi structured interviews and textual analysis. In this way these chapters construct a textured account of the ways in which protest coalition movements articulate dissent from the margins to the mainstream. Protest coalition movements have become increasingly active players in the formation of public opinion. These developments require academics to address the issues raised by the communicative strategies of protest coalition movements. This thesis endeavours to contribute to these debates by reflecting upon the ways in which the articulation of polyvocal dissent alters the on going relationship between activists and the wider public.

The 21st century has seen an unprecedented rise in the volume of comics and graphic novels being produced and consumed and in scholarly interest in the form, with the interdisciplinary field of Comics Studies rising to become a vibrant global community with a significant body of work and an established academic infrastructure. Alternative comics and graphic novels - those outside of the superhero genre-dominated corporate publishing structures of Marvel and DC - have driven this rise and the ensuing legitimation of the form. What defines the specific nature of alternative comics and what they are is the particular work and labour of alternative cartoonists. This work is, in turn, characterized and defined by specific tensions between auteurism (driven by neoliberalism and late capitalism's veneration of the individual and the entrepreneur) and collective production (driven by the sociological perspective of works of art always being the product of many hands). This thesis is an attempt to present specific examples of where these tensions are exhibited and, as a result, to offer new accounts of the specific nature of comics work. It is also an attempt to move away from the formalism that has dominated the field of comics studies and to move towards an understanding of comics as cultural work, informed by an understanding of comics through their creators and an approach that allows comics practice to inform comics theory. Each chapter of this thesis examines a specific aspect of the culture of working in contemporary comics, contextualised within neoliberal political economy and consistently bridging the gap between auteurism and collective production. These include the portrayal of art school and comics' engagement with institutions; the direct portrayal of work itself in alternative comics; the use of colour in comics, which here facilitates a reading of the effects of the technical conditions of production on the content and construction of comics; and finally, the effects of digital culture and new disruptive technologies on the production, distribution and consumption of comics, and how this contributes to a present and future understanding of the figure of the auteur cartoonist. Drawing these chapters together, the thesis concludes with a presentation of the auteur cartoonist as one who drives the contemporary culture of comics and graphic novels in the emerging dialectic of comics work. Comics work is thus situated as a political act and a site of resistance and rebellion through collective production.

The purpose of this work was to examine the effect of the use the assumption κω2K/ΕCM «1 in calculating K-shell ionization cross sections in the plane wave Born approximation (PWBA) where κω2K is the observed binding energy of the K-shell and ECM is the energy of the incident particle in the center of mass system. Avoiding this assumption produces a threshold for ionization at Ecm = κω2K. Calculations employing the assumption, which leads to the use of approximate limits of integration, do not go to zero for even the .Lowest values of the incident energy.