Honor and Political Imagination

Abstract

Honor is often considered to be obsolete, musty, and tethered to a distant past of jousting knights and profound inequality. And yet it endures in the present, and it is its very conceptual slipperiness that allows it to inspire political action, even as it binds and blinds one to the consequences of a rigid attachment to it. Honor persists in the political imagination and generates an almost mythic source of meaning for those who draw inspiration from it for heroic (and often reckless) acts. Honor can inspire one to act with courage and conviction, but at the same time it is profoundly destructive and anesthetizes one to the terrible consequences of its pursuit. This tragic aspect of honor is often smoothed out in contemporary accounts of honor that seek to recover a more anodyne version of it for liberal and democratic politics. This book resists that impulse and argues instead that honor in the political imagination is a much more complex concept. It does so through a close reading of several visual and literary texts in popular culture, including Game of Thrones, Wolf Hall, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Captain America, among others, and puts them in conversation with a range of texts in political theory on the concept of honor itself, including Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hegel, Nietzsche, Appiah, and more. In doing so, it attempts to show that while there may be a place for honor in the political imagination, it remains a contested and complicated one.