Browsing by Subject "Liberalism"
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Item Evaluating liberal multiculturalism : what could political theory offer in accommodating diversity?(2010-08) Alptekin, Huseyin; Gregg, Benjamin Greenwood, 1954-; Hooker, JulietLiberal multiculturalism, at least in the lines of some of its advocates, is vulnerable to serious critiques. This paper lists all major critiques directed to liberal multiculturalism without necessarily agreeing with all. Yet, this is not a sufficient reason to drop it from the intellectual agenda. In contrast, it still stands as the most promising theory to solve the problems stemming from cultural diversity. The position taken in this report sees liberal multiculturalism insufficient in accommodating all the interests of all the parties involved (e.g., different minority groups, political positions, theoretical approaches). Yet, a flexible and contextual formulation of liberal multiculturalism is able to accommodate the broadest range of demands involved in the debate without any serious damage to the core liberal premises such as respecting freedom of choice and basic human rights. What is achieved with such a formulation is not an entirely consistent philosophical truth project, but a relatively flexible guide to solve public policy issues in the face of cultural diversity.Item Horizontal rights : constitutionalism and the transformation of the private sphere(2019-07-12) Bambrick, Christina Rose; Jacobsohn, Gary J., 1946-; Brinks, Daniel; Ferreres, Victor; Tulis, Jeffrey KThough jurists have traditionally understood the constitution as a separate kind of law that obligates only the state, courts increasingly understand constitutions as creating obligations for private actors such as private individuals, businesses, schools, and hospitals. The practice of applying rights “horizontally” to private actors raises a range of questions from the theoretical to the practical and from the jurisprudential to the political. I argue that we better understand the practical and political implications of such “horizontal rights” by studying them through the lens of republican political theory. Specifically, republicanism grounds (and foregrounds) the solidarity between citizens and the uniformity between public and private spheres that horizontality ascertains. Applying this framework, I examine constitutional debates, court cases, and political histories to show how courts have applied rights horizontally across time, place, and subject-matter. By situating my study in the larger historical-political context of each place, I examine the conditions that surround the horizontal application of constitutional rights to individual citizens and other private actors. Chapter I lays out this theoretical grounding, drawing on classical and neo-republican theory to demonstrate the explanatory power of this framework. In the next two chapters, I examine the development of horizontal rights in national contexts, contrasting efforts to bring solidarity to the private sphere in India and the United States (Chapter II), and comparing attempts to establish uniform standards to govern public and private spheres in Germany and South Africa (Chapter III). Chapter IV extends this discussion to the European Union, considering how the republican framework for horizontal effect accounts for duties and standards occurring across national boundaries. In accounting for the practical power of courts to determine the rights and duties of private entities, this project contributes to our knowledge of how constitutional politics shape conceptions of public and private in our increasingly pluralistic world. This research engages and contributes to law and courts scholarship in political science. However, its findings will be of interest to all scholars interested the relationship between the state and civil society.Item Liberal multiculturalism and the challenge of religious diversity(2010-12) De Luca, Roberto Joseph; Hooker, Juliet; Pangle, Thomas L.; Tulis, Jeffrey K.; Stauffer, Devin; Forbes, Hugh DonaldThis dissertation evaluates the recent academic consensus on liberal multiculturalism. I argue that this apparent consensus, by subsuming religious experience under the general category of culture, has rested upon undefended and contestable conceptions of modern religious life. In the liberal multicultural literature, cultures are primarily identified as sharing certain ethnic, linguistic, or geographic attributes, which is to say morally arbitrary particulars that can be defended without raising the possibility of conflict over metaphysical beliefs. In such theories, the possibility of conflict due to diverse religious principles or claims to the transcendent is either steadfastly ignored or, more typically, explained away as the expression of perverted religious faith. I argue that this conception of the relation between culture and religion fails to provide an account of liberal multiculturalism that is persuasive to religious believers on their own terms. To illustrate this failing, I begin with an examination of the Canadian policy of official multiculturalism and the constitutional design of Pierre Trudeau. I argue that the resistance of Québécois nationalists to liberal multiculturalism, as well as the conflict between the Québécois and minority religious groups within Quebec, has been animated by religious and quasi-religious claims to the transcendent. I maintain that to truly confront this basic problem of religious difference, one must articulate and defend the substantive visions of religious life that are implicit in liberal multicultural theory. To this end, I contrast the portrait of religious life and secularization that is implicit in Will Kymlicka’s liberal theory of minority rights with the recent account of modern religious life presented by Charles Taylor. I conclude by suggesting that Kymlicka’s and Taylor’s contrasting conceptions of religious difference—which are fundamentally at odds regarding the relation of the right to the good, and the diversity and nature of genuine religious belief—underline the extent to which liberal multicultural theory has reached an academic consensus only by ignoring the reality of religious diversity.Item Liberal theology in the age of equality : Tocqueville and the Enlightenment on faith, freedom, and the human soul(2010-12) Herold, Aaron Louis; Pangle, Thomas L.; Muirhead, Russell; Owen, J. Judd; Pangle, Lorraine; Stauffer, Devin; Tulis, JeffreyThe increasing importance of religious and moral issues in American politics makes salient once again the question of the relationship between religion and democracy. The United States is in the midst of a debate pitting secularists and those who adapt their faith to progressive outlooks against conservatives who see a need to ground liberal-democracy in something Biblical. Taking up this debate, I argue that the viewpoints of both secular progressives and religious conservatives suffer from key oversights. While the former fail to notice that their commitment to toleration rests on certain absolute claims, the latter overlook the extent to which religion has been transformed and liberalized. Seeking a more nuanced version of this debate, I compare the Enlightenment’s case for toleration to Tocqueville’s claim that democracy requires religion for moral support. Examining Locke and Spinoza, I argue that the Enlightenment sought to achieve freedom, prosperity, and a rich cultural and intellectual life through the weakening or liberalization of religious belief. I then turn to Tocqueville’s friendly critique of the Enlightenment and try to elucidate his solution for preserving, in times of liberalism and equality, the great human devotions which he saw as inextricably linked to religion. I conclude that that by describing a civil religion capacious enough to permit tolerance but substantive enough to encourage real devotion, Tocqueville gives us a kind of moderate politics seldom found in today’s debates.Item Local believers, foreign missionaries, and the creation of Guatemalan Protestantism, 1882-1944(2012-05) Dove, Stephen Carter; Garrard, Virginia, 1957-; Kamil, Neil; Butler, Matthew; Tweed, Thomas; Sullivan-González, DouglassThis dissertation examines how Guatemalan converts transformed missionary Protestantism into a locally contextualized religion in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Using archival materials from local religious groups and public archives in Guatemala alongside missionary documents from the United States, this research identifies how converts adopted certain missionary teachings but reinterpreted or rejected others. This selective application not only altered the definition of Protestantism in Guatemala but also affected the early growth of the movement by creating contextualized forms of Protestantism that attracted more interest than foreign versions. The first section of the dissertation analyzes the theologies and goals that early missionaries brought to Guatemala and explains the intramural conflicts that created the first Protestant communities in the country. Between 1882 and 1921, five North American Protestant denominations and several independent missionaries entered Guatemala, each with particular ideas about how to improve the country both spiritually and materially. This internal diversity provided new converts with the ability to choose between multiple versions of Protestantism, but more importantly it also taught them how to carve out their own space between imported religious ideologies. The second section of the dissertation analyzes how local believers reinterpreted Protestantism within those spaces by pursuing four important areas of innovation: theological primitivism, Pentecostalism, political involvement, and nationalism. Despite protests from many foreign missionaries, between 1920 and 1944 numerous Guatemalan Protestants adopted variations of these four themes in attempts to create a culturally and socially relevant religious product. As new converts opted for these new local communities over missionary-led options, these four themes became defining hallmarks of Guatemalan Protestantism, which by the twenty-first century was practiced by one-third of the country’s population. This dissertation argues that these contextualized challenges to missionary ideas in the early twentieth-century made Protestantism an attractive local product in Guatemala and sparked the movement’s growth. It also demonstrates how poor and working class Guatemalans in the early twentieth century used Protestantism as a tool to participate in national conversations about race, gender, and class.Item A model of anti-modernism : an introduction to Nietzsche’s rationalistic rejection of liberal democracy(2010-12) Fortier, Jeremy; Pangle, Thomas L.; Stauffer, DevinThe thought of Friedrich Nietzsche is often taught, but seldom sufficiently understood, and thus what ought to be most challenging to us about Nietzsche – that is, the rationalistic basis of his rejection of liberal democracy – is not squarely confronted. I propose to lay the ground for such a confrontation.Item Modern virtue, the pursuit of liberty, and the work of self-government in The spirit of the laws(2010-12) West, Samuel Mitchell; Tulis, Jeffrey; Pangle, Thomas L.In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu distinguishes between governing regimes and positive law based on principles that emerge from relationships within the actual world and laws based on prejudices or ignorance which encourages one group to exert political power adverse to others. The reduction of the influence of prejudice becomes a central component of Montesquieu’s political theory. It requires the promotion of moderation and political liberty and becomes the central work of the legislator in “free and moderate” or self-governing states. Montesquieu’s conception of moderation and liberty requires him to develop a conception of liberalism in contrast to the approaches of both the ancient republics of singular institutions and the modern political theorists, Machiavelli and Hobbes. Both the ancient and modern conceptions of liberalism rely on a version of prejudice-inspired regimes that are inappropriate to modern self-government. The English Constitution provides the best practical example of a “free and moderate state” that can aspire to political greatness. England promotes political liberty in its two forms through the separation of powers and political partisanship, while it encourages moderation by the prudent harnessing of England’s “mores, manners, and received examples” in the form of religion, commerce, and politics (XIX, 27). The English Constitution demonstrates the difficulty of reducing prejudices for other states, and highlights Montesquieu’s ambivalence regarding man’s potential to govern himself given the constraints upon him.Item Natural right or history? The Lincoln-Douglas debates and the moral foundations of liberalism(2015-12) Moslander, Margaret Elizabeth; Jacobsohn, Gary J., 1946-; Tulis, Jeffrey KThis paper re-examines the Lincoln-Douglas debates through a comparison of two works on the subject: Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided and John Burt’s Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas and Moral Conflict. This paper examines several arguments made both in and about the debates, particularly on the status of the Declaration of Independence for Lincoln and for Douglas, on the nature and implications of popular sovereignty, and on the ability of liberal government to accommodate deeply rooted moral disagreements. The paper then considers how Madisonian political science, as articulated in Federalist 10, might yield insights about the nature of the problem the country faced in 1858 and the inevitability of the Civil War that was a result of that problem.Item Oceanic entanglements : race, gender, and fantasies of freedom in narratives of Indian indentured labor(2020-08-19) Mishra, Amrita; Wilks, Jennifer M., 1973-; Hoad, Neville W; Burrowes, Nicole A; Kantor, Roanne L; Carter, MiaOceanic Entanglements: Race, Gender, and Fantasies of Freedom in Narratives of Indian Indentured Labor examines literary representations of Indian indentured labor alongside the colonial archive. My dissertation proposes that indentured labor in the British Empire—a colonial labor apparatus designed to replace slave labor in the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, among other sugar colonies—is a critical site to examine the fault lines of post-abolition colonial narratives of liberalism. Making use of a theoretical framework that I call “oceanic entanglements,” which seeks out the often-obscured relationships and interdependencies between colonial systems or ideologies, my project unearths how the British Empire manufactured indenture as a voluntary labor force in order to proliferate post-abolitionist narratives of freedom, even as such narratives were predicated on indentured laborers’ unfree conditions. In order to frame indenture as voluntary and therefore fulfilling a fantasy of freedom, I further contend, colonial ideology needed to invent the indentured laborer as a modern liberal subject who has access to choices, and has the ability to consent to indenture. Oceanic Entanglements suggests that the figure of the indentured woman becomes an important site upon which colonial discourse fabricated consent on the level of plantation labor and sexual labor. To explore the workings of the British Empire in generating fantasies of freedom, I read contemporary fiction that reimagines indenture, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and David Dabydeen’s The Counting House, alongside colonial reports that document Caribbean indentured labor conditions and chronicle debates around the West Indian labor question in the post-abolition moment. The project reads these materials through the “entanglement” between slavery and indenture as two interdependent colonial labor regimes. In addition to examining the colonial production of narratives of freedom, I suggest that this entanglement can help generate interracial solidarities in the postcolonial Caribbean. If the beginnings of indenture prove to be a crucial moment of examination, so does the end of indenture. My project uses Ryhaan Shah’s novel Weaving Waters alongside Indian nationalist political rhetoric around indentured labor in early twentieth-century India to argue that anti-indenture campaigns and the consolidation of Indian nationalist identity are entangled. Through my exploration of entanglements, this dissertation enriches the fields of postcolonial, South Asian, and critical race studies.Item Political liberalism and its internal critiques: feminist theory, communitarianism, and republicanism(2007) Saenz, Carla, 1974-; Martinich, AloysiusJohn Rawls's political liberalism has shaped contemporary political philosophy. Three other theories, feminism, republicanism, and communitarianism, devote a good deal of space to refuting Rawls's theory, and claim to be superior alternatives to it. My main thesis is that they are not alternatives to Rawls's political liberalism but variations of it. That is, although these theories present themselves as external critiques of liberalism, they are ultimately internal critiques, because their own theories are built upon the basic principles of liberalism. This is not to deny that many of their criticisms are well-taken and thus need to be addressed by liberal theorists. I also argue that Rawls's theory of political liberalism is in general terms correct. It needs however to be revised in other to solve what I take to be its main problem: Its lack of a foundation. In my dissertation I propose a revised version of political liberalism, which includes an argument in support of the political liberal conception of justice.Item Retórica católica en el siglo XIX en México : de “ángel del hogar” a “ángel viril”(2015-06-09) Pacheco, Adriana; Lindstrom, Naomi, 1950-; Butler, Matthew; Peluffo, Ana; Polit, Gabriela; Reed, Cory; Roncador, SoniaThis work proposes that the rhetoric of virtue, virility and charity is one of the foundations of the most important epistemological discourses in the decades of 1860s through 1880s in Mexico, for the construction of the feminine model of what I call the “viril angel,” a model for female education that is even more rigid and bears a heavier ethical load than the “angel of the house”. Both models promote domesticity, marriage and maternity as the principal goals of womanhood, as well as the development of virtue and the containment of passion. I propose that the latter model, of a bourgeois and positivist nature, fits only a segment and just some aspects of the female population and is thus insufficient to represent what was expected of 19th century Mexican women. The “viril angel,” by contrast, operates within a wider context and demands not just abnegation, but sufficient fortitude for women to bear their female condition and fight for their virtue, their faith and for social order. My research is built upon analysis of rhetoric within newspaper articles, columns, editorials, textbooks, poems and literary narratives of catholic influence. I propose these texts, for being part of a narrative imaginary that delineates “the feminine” from a rather utilitarian point of view, for creating totalizing categories within a civilizing discourse, and for having been poorly studied by critics. I approach them through a transverse study of the discursive networks that, within the everyday life, motivate the collective action of women as active agents in their community and sublimate an “ideal” feminine model, through emotional rather than rational arguments. I deconstruct concepts such a “marianism”, delving deep within its biblical origins, and the so-called “Dogmas of the Virgin”, rereading them as axioms reinforcing a binary logic of sexuality and argumentative knowledge that impose “feminine virility” as a basic attribute of women. Finally, I complicate the representation of charity and poverty, analyzing them within a market rhetoric designed to increase the social capital of women.Item Sujetos étnicos e identidad nacional : urdimbre y fracaso del proyecto liberal en Ecuador y Brasil (1865-1936)(2012-05) Zambrano, María Alejandra; Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor, 1962-; Polit, Gabriela; Arroyo, Jossianna; Fierro, Enrique; Canizares-Esguerra, JorgeIn my dissertation I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to explore a crucial moment in the intellectual history of Ecuador and Brazil and the way in which late 19th and early 20th century writers articulate a representational discourse that reveals the contradictions of liberalism and modernity. I argue that after entering the modern world-system, Ecuador and Brazil undergo a comparable modernization process, which entails the emergence of the cities of Guayaquil and Rio de Janeiro as new centers of political and economic power. The study of the coincidences and discrepancies between the two national processes sheds light on antagonistic cultural systems coexisting within the realms of the new metropolis. My dissertation consists of an introduction and five chapters. In the introduction, I present the theoretical framework and explain the key concepts that are common currency in contemporary attempts to articulate cultural analysis with its social and historical reality. Chapters 1 and 2 look at the origins of Ecuadorian and Brazilian identities in the works of writers José de Alencar and Juan León Mera. I intend to trace budding national identities in each of their essays about language, race, and politics, as well as in their foundational fictions, Iracema: Lenda do Ceará (1865) and Cumandá: un drama entre salvajes (1879). Chapters 3 and 4 problematize the ways in which the novels O cortiço (1890), by Brazilian Aluízo Azevedo, and A la costa (1905), by Ecuadorian Luis A. Martínez, are linked to the intricate local debates about slavery, internal migration, and the participation of both national economies in the modern world system. I contend that the narratives of Azevedo and Martínez become “hinge-novels” for glimpsing the “national” within the “liminal,” even though they fail to foresee the disencounters between the dominant and the subaltern classes. In Chapter 5, I explore the locus of enunciation from which Ecuadorian Jorge Icaza attempts to represent marginal social groups. I argue that Icaza’s Huasipungo (1934) reveals the ineffectiveness of the liberal project and helps establish the agency of marginalized groups in the Andean hacienda. The incorporation of these marginal discourses into his narratives constitutes the first endeavor to provide subaltern groups with a voice.Item Texas Ranger, December 1946(Texas Student Publications, Inc., 1946-12) Bryson, John; Conway, Roger; Haden, BenItem The sacrifice of saying no : dynamics of conscientious objection, liberalism, and sacrifice in Israel(2017-05) Tripp, Angela R.; Grumberg, KarenThis thesis engages notions of liberalism and sacrifice to argue for the exceptional goodness of Israel’s secular, Jewish conscientious objectors who operate against an illiberal and politicized military system. It examines theoretical and empirical models of democratic and republican paradigms to analyze the dynamics of Israel’s citizen/state relationship. It draws from oral histories and ethnographic works, to document the lived experiences of conscientious objectors, thus providing a case study of Israel’s democratic liberalism in action. In constructing a comparative analysis of the functionality of Israel’s military apparatus, specifically its Conscience Committee, an argument for the waning liberalism of Israel’s already hybrid political system is presented. Given the problematic functionality of Israel’s military structure and its necessarily political nature, the motives and behavior of Israel’s secular, Jewish conscientious objectors evidence their “goodness” as Israeli citizens. This thesis offers a qualitative analysis of that goodness by engaging disparate political and social theories.Item "This novel social fabric" : genre, liberalism, and political idealism in fiction of the British Empire, 1913-1936(2013-08) Nunes, Charlotte Louise; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Shingavi, Snehal; Carter, Mia; Engle, Karen; Slaughter, JosephThis dissertation brings together British and Anglophone Indian novels published between 1913 and 1936 that address the conditions of economic globalization in contexts of late British imperialism. I use genre as an entry point to examine how fiction writers situated in the metropolitan administrative center of the British Empire reckoned with the liberalism informing interwar political idealism, represented most saliently by the 1919 institution of the League of Nations and its operations during the subsequent two decades. The primary novels in this study—Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913), Winifred Holtby’s Mandoa, Mandoa! (1933), and Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie (1936)— engage tragic naturalism, satire, and the bildungsroman, respectively. Along with the novels I address in a supplementary capacity—E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932), and George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934)—the fiction under review vividly, and at times graphically, evokes the social, political, and economic injustices attending ostensibly “liberal” British economic and humanitarian interventions in areas of Asia and Africa. In studies of the novel, there is a well-established alignment between the rise of the novel, the cultivation of empathy, and the establishment of liberal international institutions. The novels in my study represent the dynamic encounter of influential non- European nationalist voices and self-determination struggles with metropolitan legal, political, economic, and cultural institutions—from the League of Nations and the Anti- Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society to the international progressive writers’ movement and the political economy of British imperialism. In order to understand how the novelists critically examine the functions of liberalism as the prevailing Western legal-political discourse during the early twentieth century, I consider how they manipulate literary genres with historic relationships to the institution of liberalism. Given that the novel traditionally offers an ethical education by modeling processes of identification with difference, I argue that the genre engagements under discussion deemphasize the traditionally liberal value of empathy (premised on the belief that the other is a version of the self) and assert the value of humility (born of the realization that there are always unintended consequences of engaging with difference).Item Unremarkable violence and the politics of relation : education and the whiteness of institutional response discourse(2021-07-24) Cook, Courtney Brooke; De Lissovoy, Noah, 1968-; Brown, Keffrelyn D; Payne, Katherina A; Nxumalo, Fikile; Slater, Graham BAs an inquiry into the way institutional responses to racist violence shape collective understandings of violation and sustain precarious conditions that disproportionately impact people of color in schools, this project interrogates how white supremacist violence is discursively reproduced as an ordinary component of American schools and society. I develop the concept of unremarkable violence to discuss how response discourses fail to address the structural, historical, and ideological foundations of white supremacist logic, and thus render the ongoing reproduction of institutional violence and subjectification unremarkable. I further argue that the unremarkable violence of whiteness works to explain, sustain, and deny the realities of politically-induced vulnerability in the present. Grounding my theory in Black Feminist Thought, postmodern feminism, and intersubjective dialogue, I exercise Critical Discourse Analysis to examine primary sources released by political and educational leaders in response to two events of racist violence that impacted public schools: the May 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Examinations of the structural and political nature of response discourses revealed that while these events were rendered “remarkable” to the extent they conjured recognition, the process and nature of institutional response discourse reified whiteness as an unremarkable, yet powerful, mode of governing subjects and relationships in schools. I argue that whiteness and its essential violences are structurally remade and relegated into unremarkable, everyday conditions that fortify precarious conditions for people of color in schools. Finally, I consider dialogical possibilities in pursuit of more ethical relations, relations that require intrasubjective scrutiny by white teachers who choose to confront complicity within educational institutions. I theorize this ethical orientation towards radically undoing our intimate relationships with the violence of whiteness as a precursor to intersubjective solidarity in ongoing struggles for racial justice.Item Victory on earth or in heaven : religion, reform, and rebellion in Michoacán, Mexico, 1863-1877(2015-08-11) Stauffer, Brian A.; Butler, Matthew (Matthew John Blakemore); Deans-Smith, Susan; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia; Pani, Erika; Chowning, MargaretThis dissertation examines the origins, internal logic, and political trajectory of the so-called “Religionero” rebellion of 1873-1877 in Mexico’s central-western state of Michoacán. A widespread, popular Catholic uprising against the anticlerical government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, the Religionero movement mobilized thousands of plebeian, indigenous, and ranchero rebels in loose, mobile bands organized by leaders of rural middle-class extraction. By turns amorphous and strategically sophisticated, the rebellion proved difficult to suffocate, and it only subsided when a coup by the more moderate liberal strongman, Porfirio Díaz, toppled the Lerdo government in 1877. The first comprehensive study of the rebellion in English, this dissertation situates the Religionero movement in its larger political and institutional contexts and—through three local case studies—it examines the impact of religious change, agrarian pressure, and political polarization on the development of the revolt. It argues for the importance of the rebellion to the rise of the more conciliatory government of Porfirio Díaz, and it demonstrates that at the local level, the rebellion was as much as struggle within Catholicism for the soul of the faith as it was a traditional Church-state conflictItem "We have a road map". Whiteness, biopolitics, and the rise of technocratic philanthrocapitalism: the emergent neoliberal governance project of the Guatemalan oligarchy(2013-12) Perera, Daniel Alejandro; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Ballí, CeciliaScholars have tended to frame the rise of neoliberal governance in Guatemala as primarily shaped by the tangled, often contradictory relations between three main actors: multilateral organizations and international financial institutions, the state, and individual and collective subjects of rights. This thesis intends to contribute to the literature by focusing on a social actor that is seldom investigated academically—especially ethnographically—despite the determinant role that it has historically played in the destiny of Guatemala, namely, the oligarchy: an elite group of Guatemalans who by virtue of class position, family networks, and membership in business associations have “ruled since the conquest.” An ethnographic appraisal of elite discourses, attitudes, and practices, as well as an attunement to the affective dimension of elite subjectivities, can generate a better understanding of how historical relations of domination and exclusion in Guatemala are currently being reconfigured. Based on ethnographic research and a series of interviews with a dozen of its leading members in July and August of 2012, this thesis is an inquiry into the contemporary governance project of the Guatemalan oligarchy and the place that it allots to multiculturalism. In this sense, it has three main objectives: firstly, to characterize an increasingly coherent liberal discourse of national development, modernization, and corporate social responsibility emanating from the economic elite’s private foundations, think tanks and business associations. Secondly, it summarily compares this discourse to the general observable trends of capitalist accumulation around new dynamic “axes”: megaprojects (the construction of major infrastructure such as roads and highways, bridges, airports, seaports; as well as call centers, corporate tourism, malls, technological corridors, hydroelectric power plants); the agroindustrial production of mega-monocrops for agrofuels (sugarcane and African oil palm), and; extraction and commercialization of natural resources (minerals, oil, cement), as documented by other analysts. Finally, it examines the current status of multiculturalism and the ascendancy of whiteness within this emergent material and discursive landscape. I have termed this emergent model of neoliberal governance “technocratic philanthrocapitalism.”