College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item Bureaucratic Discretion: Citizen Officials and the Choice to Resist(2014) Hoffman, Christopher Andrew; Alford, C. F.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the realm of political theory, absolutism has largely dictated the conception of bureaucratic duty. Thus the ideal has seen bureaucrats as bound to obey the dictates of the sovereign, usually seen as the body that makes law. Empirical approaches to public administration have, quite naturally, pointed out that human beings, even bureaucrats, do not merely follow orders. Yet, even if one adopts an approach that sees the problem in terms of principle and agent, the concern remains of ensuring that the sovereign controls the official. I argue that this perspective has overshadowed the republican tradition, which saw magistrates as citizens first. In other words, there is a long tradition in political theory that offers scope for officials to exercise discretion on behalf of their political communities through acts of positive resistance. Mere passivity in the form of resignation or non-compliance is sometimes insufficient. A republican conception of magistrates has long afforded these officials the capacity to act on how they see things. The need for an emphasis on this approach increases as the political community itself becomes increasingly incapable through lack of knowledge or information of acting in its own interests. In fact, it sometimes happens that officials alone possess the knowledge necessary to take action on behalf of the community. The republican tradition provides a basis for rationalizing this in theoretical terms once we accept that all officials today are both citizens and magistrates in the traditional sense.Item For the End is a Limit: The Question Concerning the Environment(2007-06-04) Orhan, Ozguc; Conca, Ken; Butterworth, Charles E.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that Aristotle's philosophy of praxis (i.e., ethics and politics) can contribute to our understanding of the contemporary question concerning the environment. Thinking seriously about the environment today calls for resisting the temptation to jump to conclusions about Aristotle's irrelevance to the environment on historicist grounds of incommensurability or the fact that Aristotle did not write specifically on environmental issues as we know them. It is true that environmental problems are basically twentieth-century phenomena, but the larger normative discourses in which the terms "environmental" and "ecological" and their cognates are situated should be approached philosophically, namely, as cross-cultural and trans-historical phenomena that touch human experience at a deeper level. The philosophical perspective exploring the discursive meaning behind contemporary environmental praxis can reveal to us that certain aspects of Aristotle's thought are relevant, or can be adapted, to the ends of environmentalists concerned with developmental problems. I argue that Aristotle's views are already accepted and adopted in political theory and the praxis of the environment in many respects. In the first half of the dissertation, I explore the common ground between contemporary theorizing on the ethical and political aspects of environmental issues and Aristotelian ethics and politics. The second half of the dissertation locates the contemporary relevance of Aristotle in the recently emerging studies of "environmental virtue ethics" as well as "environmental citizenship" and "conservative environmentalism."