Thesis advisor: Patrick Byrne / This dissertation proposes to give an expanded reading and interpretation of the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ, in political theory around the question of political legitimation: What does it mean for a governing entity to exercise coercive power legitimately? To answer this question from Lonergan’s thought requires that we do several things: understand the historical context in which we find ourselves (Chapters 1-2), understand what Lonergan means by authenticity (Chapter 3), and how that relates to legitimate authority, which is an authentically operating matrix of authentic individuals participating in authentic communities governed by and utilizing authentic institutions and institutional sub-communities (Chapters 4-6). We come out at the Conclusion with a method for evaluating governmental legitimacy that expands on Lonergan’s approach.The history of the conversation concerning political legitimation is capacious, complex, confused, and contradictory, and I do not propose to recount it here in full. But with so much already said, what does Lonergan bring to the table distinct from the previous conversation? What is new is his philosophical focus, emphasizing method over concrete content or legislative procedure, which leads to an account of legitimation as authenticity. What matters is how individuals, communities, and institutions, including governments, are operating, not what particular form they take. Granting that his account of legitimation as authenticity is unique, why do we need authenticity to make sense of legitimate political authority? What does it add that the myriad other available accounts of legitimation do not already have?
Available accounts of legitimation meander through the shoals of history, and it’s usually only through trial and error that a navigable passage connecting power to legitimate authority is found. In brief, what Lonergan’s thought provides is a way to skim over the shoals of history so that no matter what new features may form beneath the waves, legitimate authority will always be possible and recognizable. We begin with an extensive but partial mapping of those shoals and pointing to some of the major shipwrecks of previous theories, the better to distinguish Lonergan’s view of legitimation as rooted in authenticity of individual, community, and institution in subsequent chapters. This will also give us examples for practical evaluation to show how Lonergan’s method might work in action.
Lonergan is not a cultural relativist, but he does claim that his understanding of legitimacy will be applicable in all times and for all peoples and that, by extension, legitimate government is always possible, no matter what form it takes. He gives a retrospective evaluation method, looking at the progress or decline of a culture, a nation, a civilization, a people as a proxy for the legitimacy of their leadership. “Inquiry into the legitimacy of authority or authorities is complex, lengthy, tedious, and often inconclusive” because direct evaluation of authenticity is complex, lengthy, tedious, and often inconclusive. (Bernard Lonergan, “Dialectic of Authority,” in A Third Collection, ed. Robert Doran and John Dadosky, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 6) But “[t]he fruit of authenticity is progress” and “[t]he fruit of unauthenticity is decline”, and the meat of this work is to spell out in detail the authentic operations of individuals, communities, and institutions (and institutional sub-communities). (Lonergan, “Dialectic of Authority”, 6, 7) These are what produce the progress or decline, and we conclude by supplementing Lonergan’s method with an approach that concurrently evaluates the operations of individuals, communities, and institutions and their sub-communities to see whether they are operating unauthentically (because unauthenticity is easier to recognize than authenticity in concurrent evaluation) and so, likely to produce either progress or decline. This is not as reliable as the retrospective method because not everything going on at a given time can be known to the contemporaneous observer and evaluator, but it is also more useful for creating concrete critiques of what is, in fact, going forward. (Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Doran and John Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 168) / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_109087 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Berger, Christopher Dan |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0). |
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