EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY ISTITUTE Department of Social and Politicai Sciences i> i 2 I GIU. 2004 t\ r.\ K A PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICAL MYTH By Chiara BOTTICI Thesis submitted for assessment with A view to obtaining the Degree of Doctor of the European University Institute Florence, June 2004 *1 ¡ ■'If;p' ia - r ïl : À a t; :l h ^ ri f yr r :^ ?L- «m » h ! 11.ju m wjm m ■■pi w iuu» ■ff^WWfWWWWfWWIWWWII IU Illl IH HHfWW European University Institute Jit o 3 0001 0041 8863 9 EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY ISTITUTE OS* Department of Political and Social Sciences A PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICAL MYTH By Chiara B OTTICI Thesis submitted for assessment with A view to obtaining the Degree of Doctor of the European University Institute Jury Members: Prof. Peter Wagner, EUI (Supervisor) Prof. Furio Cerutti (University of Florence) (External Co-Supervisor) Prof. Alessandro Pizzomo (Former EUI) Prof. Bo Str&th (EUI) Florence, June 2004 l ib 3 2 0 .ü 14 Li U T ' \ ' " mmtmn mm&m To B. for the myths he gave me ;;it;«î :::::: " Í W B W t Ackwnowledgements This work is the result of many years of study and discussions spent in different European universities. Apart from the fundamental support of the European University Institute and of all the people working there, I have also benefited from research and discussions held at the Humboldt Universität Berlin, the Frei Universität Berlin, the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Pisa and the University of Florence. I am particularly thankful to the staff of the EUI’s Interlibrary Loans Service, for their patience and efficiency. The people who contributed to this work over all these years can hardly be enumerated. In particular, I wish to thank my supervisor Peter Wagner, without whose constant support and encouragement I could not have accomplished this enterprise. I also wish to thank Furio Cerutti, my second supervisor, whose criticisms led me to strengthen, and thus improve, my argument. Various people have also contributed with their specific competences: a special thanks to Benoît Challand (EUI), for his fundamental help with Greek philology, to Rolf Geiger (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), who lent to me his competencies on Greek philosophy, to Irene Becci and the other participants of the “EUI Bible working group” for stimulating discussions, to Elise Marrou (Paris I-Sorbonne) for her comments on Wittgenstein, and to John Michael Krois (Humboldt Universität Berlin), who generously shared with me his expertise on Cassirer’s philosophy. I am also particularly grateful to Tommaso Codignola, Thomas Hippier, Tamara Stümpflen and the others participants of the “EUI Spinoza working group”, without whose help Spinoza’sEthics would have been unaccessible. I am indebted to Alessandro Pizzomo and Camil Ungureanu for many philosophical symposia. For reading and commenting on various parts of the text, I also wish to thank Luca Baccelli (University of Pisa), John Hutchinson (LSE), Gianfranco Poggi (University of Trento), Thomas Pogge (Columbia University), Anthony D. Smith (LSE) and the participants of the “Seminario di Filosofia Politica” (Univeristy of Florence), in particular Daniela Belliti, Dimitri D’Andrea, Elena Pulcini and Monica Toraîdo di Francia. A special thanks to Alana Lentin (University of Oxford) for reading the whole text and for sharing her ideas with me. 3 Finally, I wish to thank Jeremie Barthas, Filippo Benfante, Hakim Boulhares, Jean Terrier and all the other participants of the Collettivo IUE with whom I discussed my ideas on many occasions. Note The following work is based on a variety of texts. The intent, in quoting them, has never been to fully reconstruct their content, but rather to extract key arguments for the discussion. I apologise if some authos may appear to have been mutilate. Quotations, if not otherwise indicated in the bibliography, were taken from their English translations. When these latter were not available, I translated them myself and indicated it in the text. In a few cases, when to translate was, for various reasons, inopportune, I left the quotations in their original language. References to ancient classical texts are made unsing the system “title plus reference”. For example, {Poetics, 1447a 20) indicates passage 1447a 20 of Aristotle’s Poetics. (Resp . 519c.ff) indicates passage 519c and following of Plato’s Republics More recent texts, instead, are quoted using the system “authorplus year of the first edition plus chapter (when preceded by a comma) or page number (when preceded by a colon)”. For instance, (Nietzsche 1887,1, 6) indicates Nietzsche’s Genealogy o f Morals, part I, section 6 (Flood 1996:147) indicates instead page 147 of Flood’s Political Myth. Finally, the text is most often feminised, a part from the few cases when this might have distorted an author’s thinking or attitude. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 6 I. A GENEALOGY OF MYTH 20 1. MYTHOS AND LOGOS 22 2. THE BIBLOS AND THE DIALECTIC OF THE SACRED LOGOS 46 3. SCIENTIFIC RATIONALITY AND THE DIALECTIC OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 64 II. THE NEED FOR MYTH 82 4. MYTH AND MEANING 84 5. APPROACHING MYTH 99 6. NAMING THE UNKNOWN, GROUNDING SIGNIFICANCE 115 III. POLITICAL MYTH 130 7. MYTH AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL REASON 132 8. CLASSICAL THEORIES OF POLITICAL MYTH 152 9. POLITICAL MYTH, IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA 179 IV. MYTH AND POLITICAL IDENTITY 203 10. MYTH, HISTORICAL NARRATIVES AND THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY 205 11. MYTH AND IDENTITY 227 12. POLITICAL MYTHS TOD A Y:THE EXTRAODINARY AND THE BANAL 246 BIBLIOGRAPHY 260 5 INTRODUCTION After reading John Rawls’ Theory of Justice or Habermas’ Faktizität und Geltung , perhaps the two major books in political philosophy of the last fifty years, one could emerge with the impression that politics is an activity always potentially involving rational individuals meeting other rational individuals. In whatever ways rationality is conceived, as either rationality in respect to ends and values or as communicative rationality, the image of politics resulting from these works is that of an activity which can and should be guided by rational procedures. When one looks at the everyday activity that goes under the heading of '‘politics”, one is confronted with quite a different picture. People involved in this activity are not so easily persuaded to adopt rational procedures of communication and decision. Quite often people seem rather to act on the basis of a-rational elements, some other kinds of powerful symbols and images of the world, which are not taken into account by a purely rationalist approach to politics. On the other hand, there are some events, for instance when people show a willingness to sacrifice their own lives that openly clashes with a rationalist image. The twentieth century, with the rise of totalitarianism and its two world wars contains countless examples. All the same, while the grandiose parades of totalitarian regimes exhibited the power of a-rational elements such as myths and symbols in a patent way, there seems to be some reasons to suspect that they still operate. Despite the fact that their presence is not always as conspicuous, they could still be there exercising their power in a more subtle way. Scholars of different proveniences have long since recognised the important political role played by a-rational elements. Sociologists, historians and anthropologists, each in their own way, have devoted an important part of their work to the analysis of these kinds of phenomena. Anthropologists have always been dealing with such issues. As external observers catapulted into remote regions of the world they were perhaps in 6 the best position to do so: their foreignness to the “primitives” made the myths and symbols of these peoples conspicuous to their eyes. Furthermore, in the study of archaic and traditional societies, the presence of such phenomena seemed to be the obvious consequence of the fact that politics could hardly be separated from religion in these societies.1 Historians also have long since dealt with such phenomena, at least from M. Bloch’s Le rois thaumaturges (Bloch 1924) and E. Kantorowicz’ s seminal work on the medieval political theology (Kantorowicz 1957). In particular these two works, by starting from the very observation that rulers share some properties with gods, opened the path for a new series of study on the mythical and symbolic dimension of power. But all these studies were still confined to traditional or archaic societies where the influence of myths and symbols could still be attributed to the proximity between politics and religion that characterises these societies. Sociology has also been dealing with these topics for a long time: one just has to think of Durkheim’s sociology or Weber’s works on charisma. However, whilst Weber was aware of the possibility of new prophets,3 by moving from his prediction of an iron cage, one could assume that modem politics, with its increasing rationalisation and bureaucratisation, had become immune to their influence: in a bureaucratic iron cage there seems to primabe facie little space for myths and symbols. As far as politics is seen as prey of “specialists without spirits” (Weber 1905), one could well suspect that there is no more need for myth and symbols. However, relatively recently, a new series of studies focusing on the mobilising power of myth and symbols in modem politics has emerged. The rise of identity politics and the revival of nationalism of the last decades have perhaps rendered manifest that, to paraphrase Geertz, the extraordinary has not gone out of modem politics, however much of the banal may have entered it. On the other hand, the emphasis on constructivism and the linguistic turn has given rise to a new interest in the symbolic dimension of social phenomena.