The liberal discourse of freedom of association has played an important role in propelling suburbanization, as whites who opposed racial integration rallied under the banner of individual rights and freedom of association in order to justify their decision to abandon the "chaos" of city life and...

Alexis de Tocqueville views the early to middle of the 19th century as a period of great revolutionary transition from age of aristocracy to the democratic era. In Democracy In America, Tocqueville's project, in turn, was to conceptualize the democratic institutional and cultural factors that...

Theorists as distinct as Giorgio Agamben and Robert Cover have emphasized the paradox at the center of democratic legal authority, viz. that it cannot be self-derived but must ultimately rest on some extra-legal phenomenon, usually an act of exclusion. It has not been generally recognized that...

This paper delineates a series of geographical and temporal splits, showing how different configurations of movement allowed liberalism to imagine different forms of subjectivity and produced different forms of rule. Liberal theory often imagines itself as the force opening channels for the free...

The discursive binary between individual freedom and social constraint has been central to the political imaginary of liberal settler colonies. Some have argued that this discursive binary is itself a sediment of European colonial forms which continues to operate as a mode of domination. Much...

Tocqueville's discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries...

From the context of mid-eighteenth-century Swiss debates on the natural liberty of small states and the commercial liberty of imperial powers, this paper will trace two distinct - but ultimately irreconcilable - approaches to accommodating the liberty of states and obedience to the law of...

The central claims of this paper are two: first, that the theory of agency central to Hegel's Philosophy of Right identifies integrity as a constitutive condition of freedom; second, that the conception of integrity Hegel develops - as a matter of upholding multiple commitments both in the face...

This project studies transnational Christian networks who try to promote religious freedom in China through both strategic and opportunity perspectives. What makes an advocacy group more successful than others? Does the strategy they used play a role in their success, or is it more about the...