The political uses of mortality: Citizenship and solidarity in classical Athens.

Abstract

The topic of this dissertation, broadly conceived, is the connection between death, culture and politics. It pursues this connection in two ways: through an examination of contemporary antimodern critique, and through a study of ancient Greek political thought. What both Greek thinkers and contemporary antimodernists share is a critical engagement with heroism, understood here as a way of interpreting mortality such that it yields a standard for measuring the value of actions and institutions. For contemporary antimodernists, the major trends of modernity--rationalization and social differentiation, in particular--render death either incoherent or insignificant. The failure to make sense of death has not just psychic costs, but ethical and political ones as well: we are left bereft of the capacity to either make reasonable and communicable moral choices or to act decisively as citizens. By contrast, classical antiquity is thought to demonstrate the salutary capacity of human beings to generate meaning and standards of judgment from the inescapable fact that we all die. Taking up the challenge of these critiques, I explore classical heroism as both rhetorical figure and as political reality. Chapters on Homer, oratory and drama, and Thucydides, demonstrate the ways in which heroic ideas and practice have implications for social hierarchy and gender, for civic identity and solidarity, and for democratic deliberation. The most obvious conclusion to draw from this study of the Greeks is that heroism is inextricably bound up with war. Indeed, viewed historically, complaints about the antiheroic nature of modernity have tended to be quite open about the superiority of ancient martial virtue to modern Christian or commercial decadence. Similarly, traditional responses to these critiques have emphasized the benefits of civility and the vices of militarism. This dissertation argues that in fact contemporary antimodernists are right to point to the salience of ancient heroism to modern problems, but that they derive the wrong lessons. I argue that modern polities need to be able to give a coherent public account of the significance of death in war, for the sake of democratic deliberation and civic solidarity. My study of the resonance of the heroic conception of mortality in classical culture points to both the possibilities and dangers involved in doing so.