| Recent liberal writers have attempted to redescribe liberalism as a theory of both communal traditions and personal virtue. One of the problems with this new strain of liberal thought is that it articulates this vision of intersubjectivity within a more individualistic framework, dominated by the images and institutions of law and individual rights. As a result, liberal theorists too often collapse social relations into legal relations. This dissertation poses the question: what is the result when narrow notions of juridical citizenship are established as models of public sociability? How liberal is a theory of juridical sociability?; In order to fully explore these contemporary questions, this work uses the concept of liberality as a thread. What might it mean to act liberally, with generosity, toward others? To provide a contrast to contemporary debates over the meaning of a 'liberal culture', the possibilities and dangers of 'acting liberally' will be explored, as understood by three key thinkers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: David Hume, Adam Smith and Benjamin Constant. Explicating the problems each associates with the liberal subject in a commercial and constitutional regime will involve close readings of key texts by each writer, with attention paid to the larger discursive languages each are employing.; The goal of this dissertation is two-fold. First, it seeks to better understand how early modern thinkers employed and modified conventional moral discourse to explain the role personal agency and virtue may possess within a modernizing society. Second, by studying these thinkers, we come to widen liberalism's currently impoverished vocabulary for conceptualizing the complex relationships between political, legal, and economic institutions and the manners and deportments of individual subjects within those institutions. The main advisor of this dissertation is Richard E. Flathman, the George Armstrong Kelly Memorial Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University. |
