UCLA

This dissertation investigates the fraught and often-ambiguous relationship between politics and substantive human meaning – considered here broadly as a framework within which individual human actions are situated and that suggests lives worth living, a proper order of human affairs, the appropriate relations between individuals or social/political positionalities, and/or the larger significance of human endeavor, suffering, etc. This project claims that discussions of the relation of meaning to politics are today trapped in a paradigm oriented around the liberal principles of secularism and public neutrality and whether these principles render liberal politics “meaningless” and thus uniquely susceptible to irruptions of meaningful politics from exclusivist nationalism, far-right populism, and religious fundamentalism. By engaging with three key participants in the German secularization debate (1922–1976), Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith, and Eric Voegelin, and one late entrant into the debate, Jürgen Habermas, I seek to move beyond this limiting paradigm and recover a broader set of theoretical reflections on both the necessity and dangers of substantive human meaning within political communities. Through readings of these four figures, this dissertation demonstrates that concerns and contestations around the relation of meaning to politics, rather than being unique to liberalism, are a persistent and inescapable feature of political life – and that every political form, liberalism included, inevitably develops a substantive meaningful core, as well as techniques by which to manage alternate frameworks of meaning that threaten the unity of the political community. Ultimately, this dissertation argues for placing questions of meaning at the center of political thought and discourse and suggests that not only may (post)secular questions of religion and politics be more usefully framed as questions of meaning in politics, but also that politics itself may be usefully defined as the management of meaning.