Liberalism's Children: Studies in Literature and Law

This dissertation studies the figure of the child in liberal public discourse to understand the role of judgment in the performance of citizenship. It argues that the child represents a constitutive contradiction within liberalism: the child is neither a piece of property without dignity, nor a citizen with a complete set of rights. Because the child is on the way to citizenship, discourse about this constitutive contradiction indexes the role of capabilities in a liberal, pluralistic society: rights do not self-execute, and therefore the citizen must capably perform these rights. Judgment takes on increased importance as a capability concerning the timing and form of public speech.;The dissertation analyzes texts from two separate genres to see how each one provisionally resolves this contradiction: judicial opinions that decide the scope of the First Amendment right to free speech for children in schools, and novels taught in the high school curriculum as a civic pedagogy. The dissertation develops a comparative genre theory to supplement work in Law and Literature by tending to the distinct social functions and conventions of address for the judicial opinion and the novel. It focuses on a series of Supreme Court cases and on William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The dissertation argues that Golding's allegory shows the fragility of democracy and a practice of judgment as civic virtue necessary for citizenship. Concerning the legal cases, it identifies an arc whereby the child is first treated as an individual of emerging capabilities; this strategy is later replaced by an impoverished vision of the social contract as bureaucratic management that devalues critical questioning and dissent, and disavows any state obligation to inculcate habits for a robust civic practice in its future citizens.;The analyses of the two genres challenge the viability of Martha Nussbaum's influential Capabilities Approach to equality. By identifying the asymmetrical qualities of communicative relationships in both the novel and the judicial opinions, one can identify the differential performance of speech whose success depends on notions of propriety, timing, and form as a defining characteristic of citizenship in a liberal public culture.