School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemThe self and political theory( 1999)This thesis is an attempt to analyse some of the connections of political ontology to normative political thought. Part one consists of an interpretation and defence of three pieces of political ontology generated by the later work of Michel Foucault: power, agency and autonomy. Chapter one clarifies Foucault's account of power and argues that the most interesting feature of this account for political philosophy is his account of power as influence. Chapter two discusses the first of two major objections to Foucault's work - his lack of an adequate conception of agency - and argues that Foucault's account of the subject is able to deal with this objection. In chapter three I develop a conception of autonomy from Foucault's later work that is able to answer the second major objection to Foucault's work, that it is 'normatively confused'. In part two I apply Foucault's conception of power and autonomy to three central areas of political, thought: communitarianism, Rawlsian political liberalism and equality of condition. In chapter four I analyse and reject the communitarian account of embeddedness in favour of a Foucaultian account. Chapter five discusses Rawls' autonomy based political liberalism and argues that his idea of public reason is too narrow to address the types of constraint to autonomy outlined in part one. On the basis of these conclusions I argue for the first of two theses of justice - the principle of political autonomy, which expands the scope of public reason. Chapter six is a discussion of competing metrics of equality of condition. I argue that the account of equality that is compatible with the principle of political autonomy and with the ontology of part one, is 'capability equality', which focuses on the capabilities that a person is able to attain. I conclude with a discussion of what a theory of justice that incorporated these ontological and normative insights might be like.