This dissertation explores republican thought in the early modern period in order to rethink how we regard authority in contemporary political life. The study challenges the neo-republican derivation of legitimacy from individual freedom in order to retrieve the emphasis on constitutional design and mores that energized early modern republicanism. I turn to early modern writers such as James Harrington (1611–1677), the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Montesquieu (1689–1755), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) to consider how political institutions and persons ought to embody authority. The retrieval of authority as a central concern for early modern republicans changes our understanding of the republican problematic both then and now. When neo-republicans prioritize freedom as the linchpin of republican government, they introduce a tension between government that secures individuals against domination and government controlled by the people. A constitutive tension runs through early modern republican vocabularies, but it is not that between liberty and democracy. Rather, liberty and democracy constitute a coextensive preserve placed in productive tension with the principle of authority. The dilemma organizing republican theory in the early modern period is the classical one between democratic and aristocratic institutions and manners. The desideratum of the mixed constitution is republican legitimacy, not individual freedom. From the early moderns we learn that republican legitimacy requires the simultaneous affirmation of popular power and aristocratic judgment, of liberty and authority.

This dissertation examines employments of propaganda and engagement with the politics of truth in contemporary Iran, 1941-2009. It asks if deliberation is an adequate concept for theorizing communication during a crisis of legitimacy. It situates the appearance of propaganda as a predominant mode of communication in the context of a narrative of decline that gained currency in the 1940s: within this narrative, modernity was perceived as indicating the culmination of the end of the prophetic tradition and accompanied legitimation crises during which the totality of social and historical reality was questioned. The concept that gained currency in contemporary intellectual history to name the condition of being after prophecy was a conception of purgatory that was derived from the received history of Islamic philosophy, namely, the barzakh, the condition of the soul dreaming in its sleep. Thus, to be after prophecy was conceptualized as being between the state of sleep and waking life or, rather, a state between the darkness of ignorance and the enlightenment of understanding. By examining the history above, I offer an historically inflected theorization of propaganda, in which I argue that propaganda, in this context, was employed as a mode of communication that restored faith in the world and enacted it anew such that propaganda was a conceptually prior activity to practical deliberation.

The right to self-determination of peoples lies at the core of much global disquiet.Disputes over the practical meaning of the right for all peoples to “pursue their economic, social, and cultural development without outside interference” can lead to domestic conflicts that harden over decades and others capable of enflaming geopolitical crises. I address these disputes by returning to the conceptual history of collective self-determination centering on two sources of contestation: first, who or what authorizes the political existence of a “people” to whom self-determination can apply; and second, the physical and discursive spaces that shape and limit the realization of self determination. I refer to these considerations as the “authorship of collective personhood.” My analysis identifies four interpretations of self-determination that differently understand the authorship of collective personhood: national, international, global, and intrastate. The national understanding, emerging from 19th-century European nationalist revolutions, sees political legitimacy as stemming from a nation’s attainment of statehood through liberation from external domination, as exemplified in the thought of Giuseppe Mazzini. International self-determination, which arose in the early 20th century, involved the creation of peoples in line with the ideological and geopolitical interests of external actors, as epitomized by the policies of Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson. The mid-20th-century global conception of the “right” to self-determination aimed to achieve decolonization through independent statehood, viewing the world as a site of war and peace, universal racial dynamics, and shared colonial “dependency.” Lastly, the intrastate transformation of self-determination is characterized by minority and indigenous peoples establishing their political identity within existing states through negotiations over self-governance over issues central to maintaining their collective cultural identity. These interpretations demonstrate how self-determination has accumulated diverse meanings, fueling contemporary conflicts as stakeholders invoke coherent, historically grounded understandings to assert their perceived entitlements. However, despite the challenges posed by this plurality of meanings, I defend an indeterminate understanding of self-determination. Embracing the malleability of self-determination is essential to ensure the enduring relevance of the notion to proffer a resilient framework for asserting autonomy amidst future, unforeseen challenges to collective identity and ways of life.

The overarching claim I advance here is that to understand Kant’s political thought, it is ‎necessary to understand his philosophical anthropology. This I demonstrate by examining Kant’s ‎conceptual relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Besides the introduction and ‎conclusion, the dissertation follows a fourfold topical division into philosophical anthropology, ‎philosophy of history, political philosophy, and ethics.‎The dissertation begins with the intellectual and historical context in which Kant developed ‎his novel ‘pragmatic’ approach to anthropology and the unique features he identified in the ‎human species. These include three rational predispositions: the technical, the pragmatic, and the ‎moral, which, through social interaction and history, respectively develop into culture, ‎civilization, and morality. Crucial is Kant’s positing of a moral teleological end for the human ‎species (Bestimmung). The anthropological analysis of the human species leads Kant to the ‎conclusion that cosmopolitanism is intrinsic to its character, and that its Bestimmung lies in a ‎‎‘cosmopolitically united’ system—a universal moral community. For it to fulfill its cosmopolitan ‎Bestimmung, it is incumbent upon humanity to first eliminate the chief impediment to its ‎progress—namely, the perpetual state of war between states. This it will achieve primarily ‎through rational political institutions; states ought to first reform themselves into republics and ‎then establish a “Federation of nations” (V�lkerbund) as a guarantor of perpetual peace.‎ Here I make an intervention in a long-standing debate within Kant scholarship over the ‎ostensible oscillations he made regarding his preferred form of cosmopolitical government. I ‎claim that Kant’s anthropology demonstrates that the universal moral community can only be ‎constituted under the condition of a singular universal political community—therefore, the ‎V�lkerbund must ultimately coalesce into a “World-republic”. To this end, I further advance the ‎argument that, far from being antithetical to his cosmopolitan vision, nation-states are, in three ‎major ways, conducive to it on Kant’s own terms: since, (1) they prevent global tyranny, (2) their ‎common idioms provide the most solid foundations for republics, which eventually (3) makes ‎them amenable for cosmopolitical unification. The upshot, however, is that although nationalism ‎has a cosmopolitan role to fulfill, cultural diversity has only secondary value for Kant—it is ‎merely a particular means to a universal end. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the ‎immense amount of time that humanity must traverse for it to fulfill its moral Bestimmung.‎