Dissertation under the direction of Dr. Victor Anderson:
The one and the many has been the perennial philosophical problem from Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas to H. Richard Niebuhrâs classic, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. This dissertation tracks sovereignty as a political symbol throughout modern Western political theory. It begins with the early modern writings of French theorist Jean Bodin (1530-1596) and English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), both of whom embraced monarchial views of sovereignty. It then tracks the four-fold transmigration of the discourse on political sovereignty, which rests next on âthe peopleâ in the theories of John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). With Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and GWF Hegel (1770-1831) sovereignty comes to nest in the authority of âreasonâ, which itself mutates from a self-limiting process for the sake of unity into a totalizing metaphysical entity. Finally, sovereignty comes to rest on âthe dictatorâ for German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and nationalist âideologyâ for German political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975).
This dissertation finds that sovereignty is justified by two doctrines in Western canonical discourse: that of âthe state of natureâ and âthe political body.â The state of nature is a figure of speech, a primordial myth that has been taken literally, and the political symbol of the âpolitical bodyâ is mimetically derived from oneâs view on nature. Thinking on the state of nature conditions thinking on the political body, and thus the state of nature becomes the central theme for how one thinks about sovereignty. This dissertation finds that Hobbesâ doctrine of the state of nature has become hegemonic in the discourse on sovereignty, and that his doctrines of the state of nature and the body politic have problematic enduring cultural-historical effects, especially for African Americans and the worldâs poor. The conclusion proposes implications of this migratory narrative of sovereignty from monarchialism to ideology in light of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agambenâs discourse on the âstate of exceptionâ and African American cultural critic Cornel Westâs description of the new American imperialism.
This dissertation attacks the âsecularization thesisâ about sovereignty, where according to theologians such as Anglian thinker John Milbank (1952), sovereignty has is legitimated by a heterodox theology (Theology and Social Theory, 1990, 2006). The discourse on sovereignty is necessarily embedded in political-theological discourse. Thus political theologians bear a great responsibility for the history of effects and consequences of sovereignty as the ideology of totality and power in the twenty-first century. In this sense the dissertation is prolegomena to an African American political theology in the state of exception (Agamben) and the henotheism of the market forces of aggressive militarism (where might makes right), free-market fundamentalism (an unfettered, deregulated market, even at the expense of public interest) and escalating authoritarianism (the growth in US government surveillance and policing and the centralization of key aspects of law such as criminal justice).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-04272016-162856 |
| Date | 29 April 2016 |
| Creators | Todd, Asante Uzuri |
| Contributors | Victor Anderson, Ellen T. Armour, Ph.D., Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Theodore A. Smith, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-04272016-162856/ |
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