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The general will as political legiti...

Gordon, Jane Anna.

The general will as political legitimacy: Disenchantment and double consciousness in modern democratic life.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	The general will as political legitimacy: Disenchantment and double consciousness in modern democratic life.
Author:	Gordon, Jane Anna.
Description:	361 p.
Notes:	Adviser: Ellen Kennedy.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-12, Section: A, page: 4515.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International66-12A.
Subject:	Political Science, General.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3197675
ISBN:	9780542434983

The general will as political legitimacy: Disenchantment and double consciousness in modern democratic life.
Gordon, Jane Anna.

The general will as political legitimacy: Disenchantment and double consciousness in modern democratic life. - 361 p.

Adviser: Ellen Kennedy.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

This dissertation explores the ongoing viability of the idea of the general will for understanding the requirements of political legitimacy in modern democratic life. Revisiting Jean-Jacques Rousseau's classic distinction between the general will and the will of all, I suggest that it does not invite politics that is alternatively utopian or totalitarian. Rousseau's formulation of the general will does still bear some marks of its origins in French theological debates, in particular his depiction of the general will as discovered rather than made, and yet interpreters underemphasize the ongoing political significance of the insistence that political willing be general, continuing instead to use the language of the universal and the particular. I explore the fate of the general will in the modern West that Max Weber characterized as "disenchanted" by an ascendant scientism experienced as polytheistic. In such a context, collective, ultimate purposes that could not be immediately rationalized emerged as problematic challenges to the possibility of a complete technical system. Carl Schmitt's attempts to resolve his own difficult challenge---that the response to technicism was necessarily theological and a language of political legitimacy trapped within theological rubrics---through a move beyond moral normativism fail, however, since the consequence of framing the determination of the friend/enemy distinction as the very meaning of the political redeploys theodician grammars through rendering indispensable the need for problematic outsiders in the constitution of coherent political membership. I close with a discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois's theory of potentiated double consciousness, suggesting that it offers a phenomenological account of epistemological generality, of seeing through illegitimacy toward the possibility of a general will. This illustrates both the logic of generality---of the embracing of necessary but permeable and shifting boundaries rooted in time and space---and its usefulness for articulating political legitimacy in contemporary political life.

ISBN: 9780542434983Subjects--Topical Terms:

212408
Political Science, General.

The general will as political legitimacy: Disenchantment and double consciousness in modern democratic life.
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245 1 4 $a The general will as political legitimacy: Disenchantment and double consciousness in modern democratic life.
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500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-12, Section: A, page: 4515.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
520 # $a This dissertation explores the ongoing viability of the idea of the general will for understanding the requirements of political legitimacy in modern democratic life. Revisiting Jean-Jacques Rousseau's classic distinction between the general will and the will of all, I suggest that it does not invite politics that is alternatively utopian or totalitarian. Rousseau's formulation of the general will does still bear some marks of its origins in French theological debates, in particular his depiction of the general will as discovered rather than made, and yet interpreters underemphasize the ongoing political significance of the insistence that political willing be general, continuing instead to use the language of the universal and the particular. I explore the fate of the general will in the modern West that Max Weber characterized as "disenchanted" by an ascendant scientism experienced as polytheistic. In such a context, collective, ultimate purposes that could not be immediately rationalized emerged as problematic challenges to the possibility of a complete technical system. Carl Schmitt's attempts to resolve his own difficult challenge---that the response to technicism was necessarily theological and a language of political legitimacy trapped within theological rubrics---through a move beyond moral normativism fail, however, since the consequence of framing the determination of the friend/enemy distinction as the very meaning of the political redeploys theodician grammars through rendering indispensable the need for problematic outsiders in the constitution of coherent political membership. I close with a discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois's theory of potentiated double consciousness, suggesting that it offers a phenomenological account of epistemological generality, of seeing through illegitimacy toward the possibility of a general will. This illustrates both the logic of generality---of the embracing of necessary but permeable and shifting boundaries rooted in time and space---and its usefulness for articulating political legitimacy in contemporary political life.
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