By paying attention to the habitual register of politics this dissertation has sought to contribute to the theoretical literature on democratic citizenship. More precisely, I offer a more complex account the moral psychology of political agency presumed by the turn to ethics within democratic theory. The central question of this dissertation is how do citizens come to feel empowered to act on their convictions in politics? Political theorists often celebrate civic action as spontaneity and willfulness, and at the same time lament the agency-foreclosing complexity and fragmentation of late-modern politics. Drawing out this tension in Michel Foucault’s analysis of docility and transgression I argue that a middle path between disembodied autonomy and docile passivity is articulated in the moral psychology found in William James’s account of habit. The study makes this case by looking at three episodes of the foreclosure and recovery of action in James’s thinking: his engagement with Darwinian science and his nervous breakdown in the 1870’s and 80’s; his critique of democratic docility and debate on strenuousness with Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American war; and the cynical adaptation of James’s psychology by the democratic realism of Walter Lippmann in the 1920’s. In each case I argue that James’s lively account of habit as a force of unruly spontaneity functions as a therapy of action against feelings of powerlessness, docility, and incompetence constrain democratic conviction. The result is at once a novel continuation of the American tradition of democratic individualism and a contribution to the contemporary debates on the democratic ethics of self-making.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/29794 |
| Date | 31 August 2011 |
| Creators | Livingston, Peter Alexander |
| Contributors | Chambers, Simone |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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