Janus-faced liberalism: race and the modern world-system

Beecroft, Chase Castillo (2026) Janus-faced liberalism: race and the modern world-system. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis examines the Janus-faced nature of liberal democracy through a racecritical reconstruction of the modern world-system. It begins from the observation that the universalist claims of Western liberal political order, grounded in equality, rationality, and political inclusion, have persistently coexisted with structured forms of racial exclusion, domination, and hierarchy. Rather than treating this coexistence as a contradiction to be resolved, or as a failure to realise an otherwise coherent normative ideal, the thesis approaches it as constitutive of liberal political modernity itself. The central argument is that race is not external to liberal democracy, nor a contingent distortion of its universalist commitments, but a foundational logic through which those commitments have been historically organised, extended, and withheld.

To account for the durability and global scope of this configuration, the analysis situates liberal democracy within the longue durée of the modern world-system, drawing on and critically engaging Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis. While this framework provides a macro-historical account of structural inequality and the emergence of liberal geoculture, it is shown to reach its limits in theorising race beyond its economic determination. In response, the thesis develops a race-critical elaboration of the world system by foregrounding the epistemic, political, and material dimensions through which racial hierarchy is produced and reproduced. Drawing on a cultural political economy approach, and informed by the work of Stuart Hall, race is treated as a materially effective and historically durable relation that operates across, and articulates, the economic, political, and cultural pillars of the system without being reducible to any single domain.

The thesis proceeds in three parts. Part I reconstructs the foundations of the modern world-system, demonstrating how race appears within world-systems analysis as a dispersed but insufficiently theorised component of European universalism, the division of labour, and the construction of political subjecthood. Part II subjects this account to a sustained race-critical interrogation, arguing that the economic-centred orientation of world-systems analysis imposes a temporal and conceptual foreclosure on the theorisation of race. In doing so, it establishes that race is embedded within the structures of knowledge that define the human, the political, and the social prior to their institutional codification. Particular attention is given to the figure of the liberal Citizen, the epistemic construction of Man, and the material organisation of space as sites through which racial hierarchy is rendered intelligible, legitimate, and empirically self-evident. Part III advances a theoretical integration, incorporating heterarchy, the coloniality of power, and the Racial Contract to construct a race-critical world-system in which race is established as a foundational logic operating across all dimensions of the system simultaneously.

In advancing this argument, the thesis demonstrates that the apparent contradictions of liberal democracy are not contradictions in the strict sense but follow from the ways in which racial hierarchy is constitutive of the modern world-system and embedded within liberal political order. The universalist claims of liberalism, and the exclusions that accompany them, are produced together through the mediating role of liberal geoculture and the structures of knowledge through which it is sustained. The persistence and contemporary intensification of these dynamics, evident in the resurgence of racialised exclusion within liberal democracies, are therefore understood not as departures from liberal political modernity but as expressions of its underlying structure.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: H Social Sciences > HM Sociology; H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Sociological & Cultural Studies > Sociology
• Supervisor's Name: Picker, Dr. Giovanni and Virdee, Professor Satnam
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-86173
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 13 Aug 2026 08:35
• Last Modified: 13 Aug 2026 08:38
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.86173
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/86173