Political Science Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Political Science Theses and Dissertations by Author "Baumgold, Deborah"

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    Empirical Hobbes: Science and Political Theory in the Works of Thomas Hobbes
    (University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Harding, Ryan; Baumgold, Deborah
    This dissertation adjudicates the role of empiricism in the science and political theory of Thomas Hobbes. It accords “empiricism” status as a separate, coherent motivation, apart from others (like geometricization), which helped to orientate Hobbes, shaping his political theory and filtering into his scientific ideas and practices. The dissertation demonstrates that experience played a more dynamic, if misunderstood role in early Hobbesian science than is accounted by interpreters, and disaggregates the different meanings Hobbes gave “experience,” particularly in The Elements of Law (1640) and in the first (1642) and second (1647) editions of De cive. This demonstration culminates in a treatment of Leviathan (1651) that challenges methodological interpretations, and offers, instead, that the text’s exposition was, in part, crafted to address a pair of substantive concerns about the effects of un-empirical speech and causal myopia in human decision-making. The dissertation also considers the relationship between serial composition, the method Hobbes used to construct many of his texts, and his empiricism. The study of this relationship yields two principal findings. First, serial composition encouraged changes in Hobbes’s empiricism, prompting the development of new empirical concepts, analytical-empirical strategies, and changes in his political methodology. Second, the practice resulted in layered, bricolage texts, all responding to different features of Hobbes’s world, and in which are embedded different understandings of what the empirical study of that world entails. The empirical “drift” of Hobbes’s works potentially makes assembling some set of them into a whole and the search for systematicity in Hobbes’s political theory a futile task. Thus, the dissertation questions the interpretive utility of the methodological statements elaborated in De corpore (1655). A close analysis of the statements also offers an entry-point into a discussion of Hobbes’s practice of retrojecting new, emergent understandings of science and scientific method back onto previous texts. This practice of retrojection, the analysis shows, went hand-in-hand with and, to an extent, stemmed from Hobbes’s use of serial composition, combined with his empiricism. The dissertation also features a revised chronology of the Elementa Philosophiae, Hobbes’s plan for a trilogy of texts that would elaborate the elements of his philosophy.
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    From Deliberation to Dialogue: The Role of the I-Thou in Democratic Experience
    (University of Oregon, 2012) Andersen, Daniel; Andersen, Daniel; Baumgold, Deborah
    This dissertation argues for a dialogic grounding for deliberative democracy. Building on Habermasian theories of communication and discourse, deliberative democrats think better (more just, fair, and rational) democratic politics is possible because communication itself (in whatever form it takes) provides the legitimate mechanism for the transformation of citizens' opinions and political will. However, this is a problematic foundation for unleashing the normative potential inherent in citizen engagement. There are good reasons to suspect that a politics based in rational communication cannot actually produce the kinds of changes deliberativists insist are possible. Practical limitations of scale and scope make deliberative democracy difficult to envision. And the Habermasian claim about the inherent rationality in communication is challenged by postmodern notions of language and by conceptions of the embodied processes of reasoning. However, there is another normative foundation hinted at within the deliberative literature. Some theorists gesture toward a theory of transformation rooted more directly in the experiences associated with interpersonal relations, rather than in the language that is exchanged within these interactions. Following this lead, I turn to the work of Martin Buber to outline a dialogic theory that can better explain the intuitive sense that when citizens meet and speak, they are (at least potentially) opened up to new understandings. This theory, based in Buber's "I-Thou relation" and conception of "genuine dialogue," offers an account of the phenomenon located in an interpersonal relation of a particular type in which partners in dialogue are opened up to one another. I argue that a politics rooted in this dialogic experience provides a better account of the transformative potential in citizen engagement. Building on this new orientation towards dialogue, I then demonstrate some practical institutional innovations that are well equipped to take advantage of a politics anchored in dialogue. Along these lines, the dissertation culminates in a discussion of the Restorative Listening Project in Portland, Oregon, where dialogic meeting was a central focus of the institution's efforts to deal with the problem of gentrification in the city's NE neighborhoods.
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    From Medieval to Modern Union: The Development of the British State between the Union of the Crowns of 1603 and the Acts of Parliament in 1707
    (University of Oregon, 2013-10-03) Stevenson, Kyle; Baumgold, Deborah
    Empirical studies in the sub-field of European state-building within political science have centered on material or institutional explanations for the development of the modern state. These cross-case analyses ignore key distinctions amongst cases, such as the importance of ideational factors in the modernizing process. This case study of the development of the British state looks at how changes in the conceptualization of the state and the nature of constitutionalism evolved over the course of the 17th century through the political writings of several influential theorists. This evolutionary process highlights distinctions in British constitutionalism between the personalist Union of the Crowns and the constitutionalist parliamentary Acts of Union. This study concludes with a discussion of the Scottish independence movement and the possible effects of the 2014 referendum on the British state.
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    Together in Time: Historical Injustice, Collective Memory, and the Boundaries of Membership
    (University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Barklis, Robin; Baumgold, Deborah
    How, if at all, should we remember the histories of injustice and atrocity that haunt most modern states? Since World War II, it has become commonplace to suggest that properly responding to injustices requires societies to remember them, and to remember the experiences of those they touched. But what specific value might memory in this sense constitute in or contribute to the lives and societies of those coping with troubled history? This question raises two issues. The first is ontological: what does it mean to say that a society should remember in the first place? Is it to say that the individuals who make up society should each privately remember, or is to say that the society as a whole should somehow create or maintain a collective memory that is not reducible to the sum of individual cognitive processes? The second issue is normative: what exactly can memory so conceived do to ameliorate the undesirable legacies that historical injustices leaves on the world? How might remembering help us to move forward, or help us to lessen the pains we can’t leave behind? This study takes on both of these issues. On the first, I suggest that when we speak of societies remembering, we’re speaking of irreducibly social processes, by which individual memories are translated into publicly available traces of the past, which can then inform recollection by others, perhaps at some distance from the original event. On the second, I suggest that this sort of remembering can be valuable in the wake of injustice as a way of combating the legacies of persistent harm and exclusion that sometimes follow victims long after an injustice is over, and challenge their abilities to stand, participate, and identify as full members of the political community. Memory in this sense is crucial for re-negotiating the boundaries of membership, and for rebuilding a more inclusive public world.