Social meaning and subject creation in contemporary political theory: On the proliferation of harm arguments and the structural transformation of the debate over the legal enforcement of morality, in contemporary law, politics and public policy, with a ca

Contemporary political theory has witnessed a proliferation of harm arguments across a wide ideological spectrum, ranging from conservative arguments about the harm of homosexuality, promiscuity, and drugs, to progressive arguments about the injury of pornography, prostitution, and disorder, to poststructuralist arguments about the marginalization, normalization and exclusion of the "other." In some cases, conservatives and progressives have joined forces, taken the linguistic turn, and deployed interpretive theories of harm to argue that the social meanings of certain practices, such as pornography, drinking or loitering, affect behavior and shape the subject to the detriment of society.;Many contemporary theorists decry these developments and offer hypotheses to explain and redirect the new focus on victimization. In this dissertation, I argue that the proliferation of harm arguments is a positive development for contemporary political theory. The focus on victimization has effectively collapsed the liberal harm principle: harm no longer acts today as a limiting principle on legal and political intervention because non-trivial harm arguments permeate contemporary political debates. The collapse of the harm principle is beneficial because it forces us to assess, compare, and weigh harms, in a manner that traditionally had been obfuscated by the liberal harm principle, The proliferation of harm arguments focuses political debate on the multiple and otherwise-hidden normative dimensions of harm, and may augur a more informed mode of political analysis.;In the dissertation, I focus on a contemporary harm argument---namely, the broken windows theory---to illustrate the emergence of interpretive harm theories, and to demonstrate the kind of richer political analysis that is made possible after the collapse of the harm principle. Born of conservative politics, but promoted by progressives as well today, the broken windows theory is a good illustration of a new type of interpretive harm arguments that focus on the social meaning of practices---such as prostitution, graffiti spraying, and loitering---to explain harm. In the case study, I assess the claim of harm, as well as the competing harms associated with order-maintenance policing. I suggest that the broken windows theory rests on certain unexamined categories---specifically, the categories of the law abider and the disorderly---and shapes the way that we treat and judge disorderly people. I conclude that the broken windows theory justifies state coercion and inflicts harm on the disorderly, despite a lack of evidence that it has a positive effect on crime prevention.;The proliferation of harm arguments and the resulting collapse of the harm principle have created an opportunity for a more informed mode of political analysis---a mode of analysis that takes advantage of the interpretive turn and poststructuralist writings to fully assess the multiple harms of contested practices and institutions. This new mode of political analysis has important implications for methods of proof and research design, and I discuss, in conclusion, some of these implications for future social scientific research.