College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Flip-Flops, Double Standards, and Other Political Sins: A Citizen's Guide to Hypocrisy in Politics(2020) Stonerook, Jason Port; Soltan, Karol; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)People detest hypocrisy, and one of the reasons people hold politics in such low regard is that politics appears rife with hypocrisy. The proliferation of hypocrisy in politics can leave many feeling disenchanted and cynical about political affairs. Yet even those with a strong aversion to political hypocrisy are likely to admit there are occasions when an act that has been characterized as hypocritical is actually acceptable in politics. In some cases, the offense of hypocrisy may not be very serious, or conditioned by circumstances; in other cases, the accusation may not even be valid. This study examines the question of when hypocrisy is more or less acceptable in politics. This issue is explored through a series of case studies drawn from events that occurred in American politics between 2014-2016, an era characterized by high political polarization, high-stakes showdowns between congressional Republicans and the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama, the 2016 presidential primaries, and 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The study is organized by type, with a focus on basic violations of principle; logical inconsistencies; double standards involving partisan competition; discrepancies between the public affairs of public officials and their private lives; and flip-flops. The study finds that the most useful and powerful accusations of hypocrisy are those that effectively assert that a political figure has inappropriately prioritized narrow partisan concerns over a broader commitment to principles related to democratic norms, the exercise of civic virtue, and public-spiritedness.Item DARK MIRROR: HETEROTOPIA, UTOPIA, AND THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS OF OPERATION REINHARD(2019) Wanenchak, Sarah; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Michel Foucault's body of work, the notion of heterotopia stands out as both particularly intriguing and particularly underdeveloped. Introduced in the introduction of The Order of Things (first published 1966) and further described in the lecture “Of Other Spaces” (1967), heterotopia has been used by scholars in a variety of fields, from social theory to architecture. Of special interest is the way Foucault describes the relationship between heterotopia and utopia, one defined by its liminal nature and the other by its unreality. This work seeks to shed new light on that relationship, by focusing on heterotopias as threshold spaces between the real social world and the perfected but unreal world to come. I approach the concept of utopia with an eye toward its eliminationist implications, and use three extermination camps established as part of the Nazi regime’s Operation Reinhard as cases through which to explore significant features of a heterotopia, how those features manifest in these cases, and what connects these spaces to the world that can be glimpsed in the mirror they create. Although I primarily use historical cases as a way to expand existing theory, I aim to build upon that expansion by pointing the way toward the development of new theoretical tools for historical-comparative analysis of spaces of both extermination and detention. Finally, I suggest that work might be done focusing on embodied identities as themselves forms of heterotopia, which introduces possibilities for additional analysis of the roles of bodies and identity in cases of certain kinds of mass violence and death.Item THE GUANTÁNAMO TRIALS: SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECT FORMATION IN THE WAR ON TERROR(2016) Andrist, Lester Howard; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent political theory has explored the idea that states reconstitute sovereign power by deciding on the exception to law. By deciding on which laws to follow and how to interpret them in new ways, sovereign states not only reconstitute sovereign power but they also exercise the power to set the terms of citizenship and political exclusion. By focusing on the U.S.-led global War on Terror, I argue that this explanation of how sovereignty reconstitutes itself and how it sets the terms of citizenship focuses too narrowly on the juridical dimension. Sovereign power also reconstitutes itself in a representational dimension by attending to processes of signification and representation. The juridical dimension and the representational dimension are connected because the decision on the exception is simultaneously an effort to create exclusions, both legally and through the deployment of representations. I analyze these exceptional decisions as orchestrated security events that create discursive openings and a platform for state officials to introduce frames and narratives for understanding the unfolding events in the War on Terror. Specifically, I look at the first few years after the 9/11 attacks and analyze the legal documentation that comprise the rationale and wording of key decisions on the exception, which created the Guantánamo Bay detention camps. I also conduct a textual analysis of newspaper articles written about Guantánamo Bay during the same time period in order to catalogue the frames, narratives, and representations deployed by state officials. One major aim of this dissertation is to describe how the juridical and representational dimensions articulate with one another.Item Philosopher Kings, Then and Now: The Political Philosophy of IQ(2015) Smith, Brannon Wilson; Glass, James M; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The most fundamental question of political philosophy is “who should rule?” Socrates famously argued in the Republic that philosophers were the most precise guardians of the best city. The question of intelligence is not a theoretical one; it is relevant far beyond the building of cities in speech. The importance we ascribe to measures of intelligence informs a broad range of policy questions and could challenge our democratic processes. This dissertation seeks to understand the relationship of the modern concept of IQ to Western political philosophy by investigating the role of intelligence for Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and contemporary psychometricians. Whereas intelligence has a moral dimension for the classical philosophers, Machiavelli emphasized the use of prudence in the service of ambition. Contemporary psychometrics presents intelligence as a distinct, amoral property. I argue that Freud and group psychology provide insight into the way democracy could relate to a hypothetical cognitive elite. I further suggest ways in which we could make use of the modern IQ test to improve the quality of our political leadership and make use of an important Platonic theory without abandoning representative democracy as we know it.Item A TALE OF TWO MODERNITIES: A LIBERAL ALTERNATIVE TO A LIBERAL MODERNITY FROM VICO TO HAVEL(2014) Otruba, Alexander Peter; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The resurgence of the political theory of Marx, Lenin and even Communism itself is increasingly seen in left political theory as the only means of successfully mobilizing the "energy and rage" of the people against capitalism in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. It also threatens to draw politics and political theory back into the dangerous territory of twentieth-century illusions. This dissertation--taking its cue from Jeffrey Isaac's 1995 article in DISSENT condemning the "strange silence of political theory" regarding the revolutions of 1989--looks to introduce the political thought of 1989 into contemporary left political theory. The work of Leszek Kolakowski, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel and Gyorgy Konrad are representative of a political theory that consciously works to avoid the ideological traps and illusions packaged within modernity's displacement of the authority of the natural world with the Cartesian promise to be able to both know, order, and modify that world. This dissertation places the east and central European dissident theorists of 1989 in conversation with Giambattista Vico--who in his oration On method in contemporary fields of study (1710) recognized the presence of this tension that would undergird modernity--and the Italian antifascist theorists Benedetto Croce, Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci, whom he would later inspire. Through their similar confrontations with modern totalitarian states, both the Italian antifascist theorists and the theorists of 1989 identified within modernity a rupture between "truth", concrete reality, and humanity itself. A rupture that produced regimes and politics that promised humanity's emancipation from absolutism, while normalizing its subjugation in new and increasingly sophisticated ways. Their revised theoretical approach to modernity sets aside the ideological illusions of the twentieth-century in a compelling manner, and instead offer a principled foundation for the active preservation of democracy and human autonomy. Read collectively they represent more just a critique, but also a sophisticated set of political ideas that answer those who would otherwise approach them as naïve revolutionists or even defenders of the status quo.Item After the Fire the Embers Still Burn: A Theory of Jus Post Bellum(2013) Kirkpatrick, Jesse; Soltan, Karol; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Ending wars right and justly has been an ethical imperative since they have first been fought. Given that the postwar periods of numerous wars fought in the recent past have been seriously bungled, the need for postwar ethics has become perspicuously clear. This need is also striking. It is striking because theories of jus post bellum have recently begun to take shape, yet they remain seriously deficient. Jus post bellum theorizing often remains narrowly focused on interstate warfare and is not reflective of the existing complexity and modalities of twenty first century conflict. In addition, current theories typically focus on punishment, recriminations, and backward–looking models of justice that do not necessarily prioritize relief and aid to war-torn soldiers, societies, and civilians. By theorizing the concept of jus post bellum as a forward-looking cosmopolitan model of justice, where the central task is on building a just and lasting peace through stabilization, aid, and development, this dissertation aims to fill this gap. In so doing, the dissertation seeks to broaden the scope of jus post bellum by connecting it, and the just war tradition more generally, with the emerging contemporary literature of cosmopolitan global justice.Item Nature and Artifice: An Essay on Conventionalism(2012) Newton, Benjamin Patrick; Butterworth, Charles E.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Conventionalism asserts that there are a variety of notions of justice, but no true one. The fundamental laws of any given society are said to be grounded, not on external considerations of natural right, but human agreements which change from society to society and age to age. Justice is viewed as arbitrary and the best regime a fiction. Political society is an artificial, not natural, means to achieve man's true end--individual pleasure. Thus the crucial problem raised by conventionalism is whether political society exists by convention or nature. This dissertation examines the central claim of conventionalism, namely, whether human beings gather together into political society by convention or nature. The former argument is given to the Roman Epicurean Lucretius; the latter, the Roman Academic Cicero.Item WHO IS A PERSON AND WHY? A STUDY OF PERSONHOOD IN THEORY AND THE LAW(2012) Chandler Garcia, Lynne Marie; McIntosh, Wayne; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study concerns what it means to be a person and the role the law plays in bestowing the status of person. The purpose of this dissertation is to further our understanding of how courts in the U.S., and especially the U.S. Supreme Court, have defined "person" as a legal construct within Constitutional law. In order to achieve this, court decisions concerning the personhood of key entities with a claim to personhood are analyzed and compared in order to yield a more meaningful understanding of the word "person." The entities studied include slaves, corporations, fetuses, and higher-order animals. To focus the study, several theoretical dichotomies are presented that unite the scholarship of personhood as it pertains to each of these entities. These include the dichotomy between a human being and person; property and person; and inclusion or exclusion in a community of persons. Each of these entities is then thoroughly examined in terms of the theories of personhood that are applicable to that entity, the particular historical and political circumstances that surround each entity, and finally the court decisions that determined that entity's status as a person. Through careful analysis of court documents, the study tests to see if the legal decisions reflect the dichotomies between person and human being or person and property. Further, these legal decisions are compared in order to determine if the courts have been consistent in the bestowal of personhood. Through a thorough analysis of judicial decisions concerning personhood combined with a theoretical foundation of the interdisciplinary discussions that inform and affect judicial and moral personhood, this study seeks a more concrete answer to the question, "Who is a person and why?"Item Dialectics of Disenchantment: Totalitarianism and Partisan Review(2011) Shechter, Benli Moshe; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation takes the literary and culturally modern magazine, Partisan Review (1934-2003), as its case study, specifically recounting its early intellectual history from 1934 to 1941. During this formative period, its contributing editors broke from their initial engagement with political radicalism and extremism to re-embrace the demo-liberalism of America's foundational principles during, and in the wake of, the Second World War. Indeed, Partisan Review's history is the history of thinking and re-thinking "totalitarianism" as its editors journeyed through the dialectics of disenchantment. Following their early (mis)adventures pursuant of the radical politics of literature, their break in the history of social and political thought, sounding pragmatic calls for an end to ideological fanaticism, was one that then required courage, integrity, and a belief in the moral responsibility of humanity. Intellectuals long affiliated with the journal thus provide us with models of eclectic intellectual life in pursuit of the open society, as does, indeed, the Partisan Review.Item CREATIVE REBELLION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: THE REINVIGORATION OF AMERICAN POLITICAL LIFE THROUGH PUBLIC ART(2010) Boros, Diana Zsuzsanna; Glass, James M.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawing on the work of Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Camus, and Marcuse, this work argues that there is an urgent political and societal need for greater support of public art projects and better access to these sources of funding. More art in public spaces would revive and animate communal environments, create new relationships between the individual and the public, strengthen feelings of community, and foster the desire to participate in the public. All art creates participatory desire and behavior, but visionary art is how political progress through individual rebellion can be best accessed and articulated. This work defines visionary artistic creation as the union of instinctual creative energies and rational reflection. Mainstream art, despite its aesthetic rearrangements, fails to connect the viewer with questions that will engage them over time. Visionary art, especially the public and social, is needed to seek out and materialize the newest, alternative possibilities for our individual lives, for our societies, and for the political systems under which they abide.