Item Detail
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12616
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0
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0
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English
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Citizen Opposition to the Mobile-Basing of the MX Missile : An Interpretation of the Potentials for Democratic Citizenship in the Face of Instrumental Reason
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Berkeley, California
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Graduate Theological Union
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Ph.D. diss.
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"The controversy over mobile-basing of the MX missile in Nevada and Utah during the early 1980s marked a turning point in the politics of strategic weapons procurement. Existing studies of the controversy are empirical, and focus primarily on the roles played by various government bodies not normally involved in procurement issues. Though Holland and Hoover (1985) and Culhane (1987) have studied the political issues within the Great Basin itself, there has been little in-depth treatment of the role of Great Basin citizens in the controversy. The first half of this dissertation provides a historical account of the opposition among Great Basin citizens. The account is drawn from extensive interviews with opponents, as well as the records of various citizen groups in Nevada and Utah. Particular attention is paid to the institutional and political constraints, both within the Basin and within the larger society, which confronted and affected the efforts of citizen opponents. From the perspective of many empirical as well as normative treatments of American politics, the practice of active citizenship is a questionable dimension of contemporary American political life. The second half of this dissertation consequently presents a theoretical argument for the necessity of citizen involvement in issues such as MX mobile-basing, and the need for moral, in addition to technical, evaluation of the effects of policy decisions justified by appeals to national security. The mobile-basing controversy provides a case for current debates over what sorts of moral languages are appropriate within the public life of a pluralistic society. Drawing chiefly on the critical social theory of Juergen Habermas, I argue that the MX case illustrates the fate of our moral languages in the face of instrumental reason. I use Habermas's analysis of the colonization of the lifeworld, augmented with Josiah Royce's theory of loyalty, to interpret the understanding of citizenship held by Great Basin opponents, particularly those, such as the Mormons and the Western Shoshone, who brought religious perspectives to bear on the controversy. The dissertation concludes with an argument for the necessity of maintaining and articulating local loyalties within the practice of democratic politics confronted by the spread of non-morally legitimated policy decisions." [Author's abstract]