Year of Award
2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Arts (MA)
Degree Name
Political Science
Department or School/College
Political Science
Committee Chair
Dr. Robert Saldin
Commitee Members
Dr. Ramona Grey, Dr. David Sherman
Keywords
Classical Liberalism, Democracy, Individualism, Divine Right of Kings
Publisher
University of Montana
Subject Categories
Political Theory
Abstract
Theoretical traditions are reactionary insofar as they are attempts to remedy deleterious conditions generated by certain political, cultural, and economic situations characteristic of a particular polity at a particular time. Using this lens, I investigate the principles of classical liberalism and suggest that they are specifically designed to solve the problems that animated the world of divine right, essentially functioning as transitional mechanisms pulling society towards liberal social contract regimes and away from antiquated feudal institutions and absolute monarchy. I craft a narrative that demonstrates that the main problem all of them coalesce to solve is individualism which, under divine right, was sequestered at the apex of monarchical governmental and religious structures and thus rendered a privilege only enjoyable by the upper echelons of these societies. According to this retelling, classical liberalism represents a theoretical campaign to democratize access to sovereign individualism, empowering the burgeoning laboring class to understand themselves as possessing an individual identity useful for locating a capacity for rationality, a normative claim of political equality, a justificatory framework within which to house negative liberty, and a structure that ‘rule of law’ could be employed to guide.
The implications this alternative way of understanding the foundations of classical liberalism has for contemporary American society are profound. I argue that as these principles continue over time to engender individualism, they begin to lose temporal proximity to divine right and the problems that they were designed to solve and thus become solutions in search of a problem. Today, this has caused American society to become increasingly individualistic as the principles of classical liberalism continue to democratize the once-noble privilege of sovereign individualism. I end by crafting a rudimentary theoretical program designed to challenge the supremacy of classical liberalism and undermine specific aspects of it that appear most responsible for the modern calcification of atomistic individualism in the body politic.
Recommended Citation
Ladd, Austin Daniel, "Liberal Men, Rational Kings: The Democratization of Sovereign Individualism" (2023). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 12235.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/12235
Included in
© Copyright 2023 Austin Daniel Ladd