The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought - Hardcover

"The Headless Republic is a fascinating overview of a crucial and often overlooked problem in modern French intellectual history: the problem of political and social foundation through religious fervor and sacrificial violence. Jesse Goldhammer's book will be a standard reference in its area."-Allan Stoekl, Pennsylvania State University "Jesse Goldhammer has written a daring and thoughtful book about an intriguing and dangerous current in political theory. The Headless Republic delineates the French Revolutionary economy of violence, showing how Revolutionary practice and thought appropriated an ancient logic in which violent sacrifice invested political authority with the aura of the sublime."-Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania "In this unusual and provocative study in intellectual history, the author explores the theme of sacrifice in French political thought. Goldhammer traces the idea of sacrifice from both its religious roots (martyrdom and self-sacrifice for the glory of God) and Greek mythology and republican Rome to the French Revolution and beyond."-Choice, April 2006

In The Headless Republic, Jesse Goldhammer explores how the French revolutionaries retrieved a set of ideas about founding violence from the classical Romans and early Christians and incorporated it into postrevolutionary debates that echoed into the twentieth century. By linking sacrifice as expressed in revolutionary practices to modern French theory, Goldhammer shows how ancient ideas of violent political renewal made their way into the contemporary age.Goldhammer elucidates the theoretical and practical significance of sacrificial violence during the Revolution, and then turns his attention to postrevolutionary intellectuals whose work is inspired by the founding sacrifices of the French Republic. Showing how Georges Bataille, Joseph de Maistre, and Georges Sorel adapted concepts of sacrifice to their own particular political agendas-whether reactionary or revolutionary-Goldhammer challenges conventional readings of these three thinkers as "bloodthirsty intellectuals." Instead, he argues, their work reveals the limits of violence as an agent of political change and attacks the forms of violence later adopted by fascist regimes. More broadly, Goldhammer makes the case for including ancient concepts of collective bloodshed in the modern lexicon of political violence.