3 resultados para liberal thought
em Duke University
Resumo:
*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*
This paper examines how contemporary literature contributes to the discussion of punitory justice. It uses close analysis of three contemporary novels, Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke, and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage, to deconstruct different conceptions of punitory justice. This analysis is framed and supported by relevant social science research on the concept of punitivity within criminal justice. Each section examines punitory justice at three levels: macro, where media messages and the predominant social conversation reside; meso, which involves penal policy and judicial process; and micro, which encompasses personal attitudes towards criminal justice. The first two chapters evaluate works by Atwood and Jordan, examining how their dystopian schemas of justice shed light on top-down and bottom-up processes of punitory justice in the real world. The third chapter uses a more realistic novel, Oates’s Carthage, to examine the ontological nature of punitory justice. It explores a variety of factors that give rise to and legitimize punitory justice, both at the personal level and within a broader cultural consensus. This chapter also discusses how both victim and perpetrator can come to stand in as metaphors to both represent and distract from broader social issues. As a whole, analysis of these three novels illuminate how current and common conceptualizations of justice have little to do with the actual act of transgression itself. Instead, justice emerges as a set of specific, conditioned responses to perceived threats, mediated by complex social, cultural, and emotive forces.
Resumo:
Police is Dead is an historiographic analysis whose objective is to change the terms by which contemporary humanist scholarship assesses the phenomenon currently termed neoliberalism. It proceeds by building an archeology of legal thought in the United States that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My approach assumes that the decline of certain paradigms of political consciousness set historical conditions that enable the emergence of what is to follow. The particular historical form of political consciousness I seek to reintroduce to the present is what I call “police:” a counter-liberal way of understanding social relations that I claim has particular visibility within a legal archive, but that has been largely ignored by humanist theory on account of two tendencies: first, an over-valuation of liberalism as Western history’s master signifier; and second, inconsistent and selective attention to law as a cultural artifact. The first part of my dissertation reconstructs an anatomy of police through close studies of court opinions, legal treatises, and legal scholarship. I focus in particular on juridical descriptions of intimate relationality—which police configured as a public phenomenon—and slave society apologetics, which projected the notion of community as an affective and embodied structure. The second part of this dissertation demonstrates that the dissolution of police was critical to emergence of a paradigm I call economism: an originally progressive economic framework for understanding social relations that I argue developed at the nexus of law and economics at the turn of the twentieth century. Economism is a way of understanding sociality that collapses ontological distinctions between formally distinct political subjects—i.e., the state, the individual, the collective—by reducing them to the perspective of economic force. Insofar as it was taken up and reoriented by neoliberal theory, this paradigm has become a hegemonic form of political consciousness. This project concludes by encouraging a disarticulation of economism—insofar as it is a form of knowledge—from neoliberalism as its contemporary doctrinal manifestation. I suggest that this is one way progressive scholarship can think about moving forward in the development of economic knowledge, rather than desiring to move backwards to a time before the rise of neoliberalism. Disciplinarily, I aim to show that understanding the legal historiography informing our present moment is crucial to this task.
Resumo:
Duarte et al. draw attention to the "embedding of liberal values and methods" in social psychological research. They note how these biases are often invisible to the researchers themselves. The authors themselves fall prey to these "invisible biases" by utilizing the five-factor model of personality and the trait of openness to experience as one possible explanation for the under-representation of political conservatives in social psychology. I show that the manner in which the trait of openness to experience is conceptualized and measured is a particularly blatant example of the very liberal bias the authors decry.
