Search

Since the 1970's, women in liberal Western Societies have experienced greater freedoms than ever before. However, it can be argued that while these women have gained some freedoms, they have not yet won the battle for equal status. Instead, women continue to battle a patriarchal society in order to gain the respect and equal treatment that they feel is deserved. Most liberal feminists believe that this struggle continues because of a discrepancy in the social compact. As a result of this discrepancy, some liberal feminists advocate for the total removal of this social compact, whereas others demand a partial review of the compact. This paper will review the argument of Carol Pateman in her work, The Sexual Contract, and then will attempt to critically examine classic liberalism. Classic liberalism will be examined as a way to identify a power system that motivates the biased nature of the social contract. These concepts will inform the differences between the ideal social contract and the currently existing power driven social contract. Thirdly, this paper will look at the influence of the power driven social compact on gender education and shall identify major necessary changes in gender education before the ideal social contract can be recognized. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the fundamental split which liberals chose to engage with the political party as viewed through three authors including James Bryce, Max Weber, and Moisei Ostrogorski. It mentions that understanding this split is critical to resolving fundamental issues in democratic thought and contemporary liberalism. It notes that theses authors' prescriptions for salvaging liberalism and for democracy were radically different.

Political theory addressing environmental problems typically takes a single type of issue, such as climate change, as exemplary and relies upon this type as the basis for theorizing. This paper begins with a simple but often neglected question: What makes an environmental problem a political problem? I begin with a set of temporal and spatial distinctions in order to illuminate the variety of environmental problems before turning to the role of complexity and uncertainty in understanding environmental problems. The purpose is to determine whether there is a unifying idea behind this variety of problems that is amenable to deliberative or participatory democracy and whether an attachment to a participatory idea of democracy is sustainable in light of these problems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic data collected around the Washington Metro (Metro), this paper uses a relational methodology to examine the effects of the talk of "terrorism." How do stories of "terrorism" work in this context? What identity and (in)security performances are stabilized around this sign of danger? Genealogically, I will demonstrate that media reports, official articulations and rider talk combined around "terrorism" during the 1990s and surged forward after 2001. The effects of this in everyday interaction are to invest the Metro with a fairly stable structure of meaning that is concretely given form through a variety of security practices that include surveillance and information coordination. I argue that together, talk of "terrorism" and counter-"terrorist" practice fashions the Metro into a risky place that calls forth a vigilant and patriotic consumer. Constituted by the risk of "terrorism," the Metro can be seen as a biopolitical mechanism that disciplines individual conduct and governs the flow of people moving through the transit system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explain governmental fragmentation in metropolitan regions as a process of institutional evolution, building on the recent parallels by historical institutionalist scholars between institutions and genetic codes, and between new ideas and genetic mutations. These parallels are significant because they point to social science models that are inherently historical-comparative, and which cannot be reduced to the standard comparative statics models. I argue that discussions of metropolitan fragmentation fall too often into a comparative statics framework where the goal is to identify the impact of discrete variables at discrete levels of policy-making (i.e., local, metropolitan, and state). I suggest instead a model that explains metropolitan institutional change through the interaction between variables (broadly conceived) at different policy-making levels and in doing so I also attempt to add some greater specification to the evolutionary metaphor. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to problematize the discourse and politics of civil society, the former as produced by liberal democratic theory and mainstream democratization literature and the latter as carried out by various agencies of international democratic aid industry. The operation of a liberal discourse on democracy and the vanguard role it assigns to a particular model of civil society is construed here as an exercise in regulatory and disciplinary power implicated in governmentality in the Third World. Taking its cue from the Foucauldian genealogical approach questioning the conditions of possibility, modalities and constitution of the objects and domains of power (Foucault in 'Power' 2000; 118), this analysis is about how a certain regime of truth around the universal value of liberal democracy progressively re-constitutes the not-yet-so-civil subjects of the Third World through a multiplicity of mechanisms and shapes the contours of the political - without indelibly fixing them- in those transitional settings via novel forms of intervening into and managing the political energies and potentialities of those populationsBearing in mind the accompaniment of major mechanisms of power by ideological productions, I shall argue that the discursive production of the democratization paradigm in Western political theory entails the specific production of the Third World subjects through the practice of democratic aid interventions in the political processes of the Third World, thus constitutes an exercise in power. A regime of government is erected over the Third World, discursively and practically marking out uncivil societies in need of Western democratic aid; its control, surveillance, discipline and administration. Such an intervention in the government of the socio-political in the Third World is made possible by the production and circulation of a politics of truth, of an expert knowledge construing certain forms of knowledge as ontologically true, thereby setting the limits of what can be said, by whom, and with what legitimacy. Using the Western liberal model of civil society as the hegemonic benchmark against which to evaluate political change and development in the Third World, the democratization paradigm, in discourse and practice, governmentalizes 'civil society' for the ultimate purpose of shaping it to fit a preexisting model of democratic development; through the conditional funding of Southern non-governmental organizations by the democratic aid agencies. The instrument and effect of such intervention appears to be the normalization of liberal democratic ethics, the inculcation of universally appraised modes of political conduct, thereby constituting a momentary suture of the political, yet never complete. In the process, a whole set of local knowledges have been disqualified as inadequate, "located low down on the hierarchy", and subjugated, the insurrection of which requires "opposing the effects of centralizing powers linked to the institutions and functioning of an organized scientific discourse" (Foucault in 'Power and Knowledge'; 84). Nonetheless, the subjugating and constitutive functions of power-knowledge are inseparable from its contradictory effectivities in generating novel sites of counter-hegemonic resistance intent on resuscitating such subjugated knowledges. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly four decades have passed since George Schwab introduced Carl Schmitt to the English-speaking world with the groundbreaking monograph The Challenge of the Exception. Scholars have since attempted to understand in what manner Schmitt ought to be interpreted. I contend that the parameters of Schmitt scholarship are overly restricted, thereby fostering a debate that is incomplete. The following questions have generated much controversy. To what extent does Schmitt's Weimar political thought represent a thoroughgoing anti-liberalism? Did Schmitt's Weimar work lead him to embrace Nazism? Scholars who allege that Schmitt's thought is unredeemably anti-liberal and led to Nazism are known as 'detractors.' Those who perceive significantly less anti-liberalism in his Weimar writings are typically known as 'apologists.' Where detractors discern an unqualified assault on liberalism, apologists identify 'political realism.' Detractors identify an intellectual continuity that includes most Weimar and Nazi period writings but apologists remain unpersuaded. They contend that Schmitt's work from the Nazi period is fundamentally different from his Weimar writings. Although a more nuanced division of Schmitt scholars into 'strong apologist,' 'weak apologist,' and 'strong detractor' has been proposed, I argue that these interpretations are deficient and thereby provide a limited understanding of Schmitt. Accordingly, I carve out an interpretive space for the inclusion of a fourth interpretation of Schmitt: the 'weak detractor' position. In defense of this 'weak detractor' position, I offer an interpretation of Schmitt that takes his anti-liberalism seriously but does not go as far as the 'strong detractor' interpretation that Schmitt inevitably became a Nazi. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that modern political theory can be divided into two groups that are distinguished by their treatment of property rights. One group, property first theories, argue that the right to private property is conceptually prior to political obligations. The other, property second theories, contend that property claims follow from politics and the political community. While these two conceptions of property frame much of contemporary political theory, the fundamental role of property within these theories is often neglected. Property first theories fail because they misunderstand the obligations that property claims place on others. Property second theories provide the only defensible starting point for political theory. This should cause us to reject political theories that conceive of property as a pre-social institution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]