A Demotic Void: Materialism, Capitalism, and Inequality in a Large Republic

Capitalism;Materialism;Lucretius;Marx;Inequality;Arendt;Democracy;Political Science

Dixon, Charles WilliamKhan , MohammedA. ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Capitalism;    Materialism;    Lucretius;    Marx;    Inequality;    Arendt;    Democracy;    Political Science;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60532/DIXON-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation will address the politics of socioeconomic inequality in the contemporary United States, using a model of politics and nature drawn from ancient Greek atomism, a tradition most often associated with Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. The emerging politics of inequality in the US calls for new ways of conceiving the relationships, or ;;conventions,” between democracy, capitalism, and nature. These conventions can be rethought together through what I will call ;;local materialism,” which is a conception of nature and politics that proceeds from a theoretical reconstruction of ancient atomism. In reinterpreting the political theories of the atomists, this project seeks to evoke new ways of convening democratic equality for the present day. I will argue that in order for US democracy to reassemble itself amidst the globally warming capitalisms of the twenty-first century, Americans and others must re-imagine themselves as a new kind of demos, as self-organizing bodies that respond to new actors, events, processes, and circumstances in and around capitalism and nature. Local materialism helps us to do this through the habituation of a certain kind of political affect, a way of moving and feeling in concert with others that creates new powers. These signature political inclinations of the atomists I call ;;demotic ataraxy.” As a publicly fashioned form of contemplation, perception, and attachment, demotic ataraxy helps to sustain a creative, disruptive sense of commonality or ;;harmony.” Local materialism, as a model of nature that involves but is irreducible to human social structures, also yields a distinctly physicalist image of capitalism as a field around which inequalities emerge. Here capitalism, like democracy, is understood not as an abstract or ideal theory applied, however imperfectly, to ;;actual societies,” but rather as a physical body in itself, a complex and shifting array of things, energies, temporalities, spaces. It is my hope that this materialism will help the many in the US and elsewhere to make better political sense of these unequal times of capitalist expansion and ecological catastrophe.