Abstract

This dissertation investigates the modern conception of the political. Its thesis is that the idea of totalitarianism plays an important but theoretically unacknowledged part in defining and delineating the liberal conception of politics, and that an adequate understanding of totalitarianism itself demands a reconsideration of the modern conception of politics which informs liberalism. ;Part One of the dissertation analyzes the implications of the modern project of emancipation specifically in connection with the idea that society is an artifact, an idea first articulated comprehensively by Hobbes. By examining the idea of society as artifact I uncover and retrieve the distinctively modern ontological commitments.of both liberalism and totalitarian movements, and try to show how these commitments can be read as placing them into dialectical opposition with one another. ;Part Two questions the liberal response to the modern "emancipation from meaning." Liberalism systematically has to posit a greater degree of agreement than can be justified. By turning to an examination of Kant's theory of judgment I show how the problem of judgment exposes an indeterminacy in the construction of experience, which gives theoretical opportunity to the idea of totalitarianism. ;Part Three provides a critique of totalitarianism from the perspective of an aesthetic approach to politics. Hannah Arendt's work provides the vehicle for this argument. ;This dissertation can be read in several different ways: as an attempt to understand the significance of the idea of totalitarianism for the liberal conception of politics; as a philosophical examination of totalitarianism itself; as a work that sets Hannah Arendt's political philosophy into the context of a neglected, but resurgent, modern strand of thought which provides an alternative to the narrow liberal conception of the political and makes sense of much that has been misunderstood in the work of this academically marginalized, yet extraordinarily influential, political thinker