Browsing by Subject "political theory"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Becoming Responsible: Conceptual Change in the Emergence of Tort Law
    (2015-12) Goltz, Caleb
    Classic conceptions of how law, politics, and morality relate to one another argue that moral and political goals drive legal innovation and practice. This dissertation argues that the classic conception is flawed because legal practices can supersede the moral and political goals they originally set out to accomplish and this has consequences for political and moral discourses. Through archival research in the little-investigated history of tort law, this project uncovers how the moral concept of responsibility developed in tandem with the legal technology of tort law and how the original asymmetries between the moral concept and the legal technology were leveraged by the legal profession to create a set of far reaching practices that governed independently of moral justification. My dissertation argues that through the legal evolution of the concept of responsibility, tort law acquired its present dual role as both codified law and social discipline.
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    Politics Of The Highly Improbable: Anticipation, Catastrophe, Security
    (2018-05) Kindervater, Garnet
    This dissertation theorizes the politics of imagining future catastrophes and their effects on contemporary political life. Interpreting late-20th century theories of epistemology and power, it scrutinizes concerns about human insecurity and their involvement in cultural knowledge production. In its broadest sense, the research articulates the politics of how humans live (and die) today; but most critically, how such politics influence ideas as the central fabric of contemporary life. Focusing chiefly on Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, critical security studies, and untranslated thinkers in contemporary French philosophy, it conceptualizes concerns for protecting against future events. I characterize future catastrophes not as empirical realities in themselves – because they exist in the future, and therefore not at all – but as speculative constructions that nevertheless bear enormous political force. I argue that speculating about disasters animates widespread anxieties about safety and insecurity in the United States. I develop this thesis under the banner of “catastrophism,” which designates a rational orientation to future disaster and a pervasive preoccupation with insecurity and death. The concept illustrates the relationship between security expertise and political life, broadly conceived, as it is informed by imagining future catastrophes in cultural and political discourses.
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    Remapping the World: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Ends of Settler Sovereignty
    (2016-10) Temin, David
    This dissertation reconstructs the political thought of Yankton Dakota activist-intellectual Vine Deloria, Jr. (1933-2005) in order to explore how Indigenous peoples in the Americas have developed a tradition of politically engaged, anti-colonial critique—a politics of decolonization. Since World War II, democratic theorists have mounted accounts of civic inclusion and multicultural representation to both invigorate projects of democratic state- and nation-building and to respond to legacies of racial and cultural injustice. Against these accounts, I argue that settler democracies make their boundaries through colonial projects of replacement and normalized incorporation that disavow and dissolve Indigenous peoples’ separate polities. Beginning with his leadership in the National Congress of American Indians in 1964, Deloria provided a) an analysis of narratives of civic inclusion and multicultural representation as colonial and b) translated practices of decolonization emergent from the Indigenous sovereignty movement into an evolving framework of shared Indigenous concepts. The project traces Deloria’s counter-proposals through three phases: First, Deloria confidently re-theorized democratic state-building as “empire” so as to promote among Indigenous peoples an anti-colonial politics of self-determination (1964-1969). Second, Deloria aggressively reimagined Indigenous sovereignty as a distinctive variant of constituent power (1969-1975). Third, Deloria disappointedly reckoned with the durability of colonialism and capitalism as twin engines of destruction and re-described Indigenous conceptions of sacred territory, relationship, and responsibility as the ethical-political foundations of decolonization (1975-2005). Through this reconstruction of Deloria’s work in conversation with contemporary Indigenous and Settler-Colonial Studies, my project provides a basis for refashioning political theory’s core interpretive commitments to address the questions of dispossession, landlessness, self-determination, and sovereignty most apt for decolonization struggles in settler-colonial contexts.