Abstract

Western political theory has long been concerned with the problem of political foundation. Although political beginnings, past and present, have often reflected the distinctly human impulse to realize some version of the good life, the act of foundation itself has just as frequently been mired in blood. Thanks, in particular, to the French Revolution, modern political thought exhibits an enduring fascination with revolutionary change. Ironically, however, few modern thinkers have explored in any depth why violent political foundation has historically been associated with similar formations of violence. ;In this dissertation, I argue that the historical emergence of sacrificial practices during the French Revolution gave birth to a longstanding and heretofore unrecognized French tradition of thought concerned with the relationship between sacrificial violence and political foundation. Sacrificial violence is a form of communal bloodshed that has historically served to bond human beings into communities. When the revolutionaries adapted ancient Roman and early Christian concepts of sacrifice to the first modern revolution, they lent credence to the idea that founding new regimes required sacrificial violence of mythic proportion. After the Revolution, the specifically sacrificial nature of the most important episodes of revolutionary violence inspired a diverse group of anti-Enlightenment French intellectuals to incorporate the concept of sacrifice into their unique political reflections. These thinkers---Joseph de Maistre, Georges Sorel and Georges Bataille---are united by the desire to understand the revolutionary implications of sacrificial violence. Together, they have produced a unique body of theoretical work that I call "the French discourse on sacrificial violence." By analyzing the evolution of this discourse, I explain why sacrifice is political; why these thinkers associated it with the foundation of new regimes; and how its unique properties fashioned an ideal weapon against Enlightenment philosophy and politics. ;No one has yet offered a sustained explanation of the connection between sacrificial violence and political foundation or examined the political significance of the adaptation of sacrifice to a modern setting. In accomplishing these goals, my work demonstrates the theoretical importance of the concept of sacrifice for modern French political thought. For Maistre, Sorel and the French revolutionaries, sacrifice serves as a violent catalyst of moral transformation that affects how people perceived authority. Their sacrificial politics challenge the hegemonic liberal view that political foundation involves the contractual aggregation of rational, self-interested individuals. Instead, for them as well as for Bataille, sacrifice is a mechanism of non-rational and non-contractual social congregation; it functions to bond human beings together into political communities that spurn Enlightenment ideas. This discourse's enthusiasm for sacrificially founded politics come to an end, however, in the work of Bataille because he recognizes that authority constituted by sacrifice requires a constant repetition of the original founding crime. Bataille's insight into the dangers of sacrificial violence also provides a framework for clarifying Maistre, Sorel and Bataille's association with fascism Finally, this study adds a new term to the lexicon of political violence by establishing the importance of the concept of sacrifice for thinking about and interpreting a certain category of bloodshed that lamentably remains part of the modern world