Abstract

To speak of liberalism today is to invoke 'the political' in global as well as domestic terms. This study investigates the classical roots of political liberalism in order to explore how the basic concepts of politics and community are framed throughout the modern epoch. The classical liberal modality of reflecting on politics and community, it is argued, is oriented toward activating what is termed a 'disposition of necessity.' This disposition governs thought by effecting recourse to an account of the person and the political world, but also by the need for recourse to an unquestioned center of political legitimacy. The 'disposition of necessity' constitutes itself as a problematic in late modern reflections on 'community' in world politics. The thesis of this dissertation is that conceptions of the person and the political embody the remainders of a deep worry over the precarious nature of legitimacy. More than a tradition, liberalism activates a desire to dispense with anxiety over the politics of legitimacy. Sovereignty is the embodiment of this desire. It works to delimit the field of historical representation and constrict the compass of political community. The liberal tradition activates a forgetting of the temporal frailty of all politics. The politics effected by contemporary liberal doctrines is thus simultaneously imbued with this anxiety and gains legitimation through the political practices which it is made to effect in turn, thereby securing what can be made to be regarded as a stable ontological foundation for political experience. This dissertation examines these political practices through a study of the policies of post-Second World War multilateral trade liberalization. The pursuit of international trade liberalization reflects early modern anxieties about the terms of world political community, which, by the late twentieth century, seeks moral-political legitimation through distinct early liberal and Enlightenment frames. What is truly unique about the character of the political emerging in this expanding geography of political experience is a struggle to found legitimacy without recourse to a modern metaphysics, a metaphysics which would negotiate the terms of that legitimacy through an appeal to an 'identity' within and against a 'difference' without