Abstract

A Tale of Two Liberalisms studies the tension between two psycho-political models of personality. The early American heritage, embedded in the Federalist Papers and in the design of the Constitution, establishes conscious individual decisions as the basis of public order. The second liberalism, 'experimental liberalism', is a byproduct of stimulus-response reasoning in psychological sciences. This theory replaces the rationalist model with deterministic concepts of reaction to both biological and environmental forces. The dissertation focuses on the stresses impinging on language uses. The 'classical' liberal insists that there are no facts beyond what is comprehended and articulated by each individual. The stimulus-response model, by contrast, maintains that all human speech and cognition is reducible to a scientific description which is very frequently, perhaps usually, not understood as such by the individuals appraised