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Sacrifice, a Democratic Fact
wrote a controversial article against
school desegregation in the wake of the September struggles in
Little Rock, Arkansas, and published it two years later in Dissent magazine. The city had exploded over whether nine African American
students who had been admitted to the previously whites-only Central High would in fact attend. Arendt’s article, “Reflections on Little
Rock,” criticized the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) and the parents of the Little Rock Nine
for using political institutions like the courts and the public sphere
generally to effect what she considered not a political program but
self-interested social advancement. Much affected by the news photographs of Elizabeth being menaced by a nasty mob as she, unaccompanied, tried to enter the school, Arendt argued further that the
parents, in pursuing social advancement, were exploiting their children. “The girl obviously was asked to be a hero,” Arendt wrote,
“[which] is, something neither her absent father nor the equally absent representatives of the NAACP felt called upon to be” (RLR ).1
Arendt objected to any strategy that drew children, white or black,
into a political fray, but when she accused the African American parents of a lack of heroism, she also more specifically charged the desegregation movement with a failure to rise to the level of political
action. Her position depends heavily on the argument she published
almost simultaneously in the Human Condition of that politics,
properly understood, is a heroic activity; Achilles, the Greek hero of
the Trojan War, is her paradigmatic political actor. In her analysis, the
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parents mistook a “social issue” for a legitimate political battleground.
This contention that school desegregation was not an appropriate object of political action rested on her strong distinctions among private,
social, and political spheres. To the private realm she assigned intimacy and activities like marriage, love, and parenting; in the social
world we secure our economic livelihood and also, importantly, discriminate against others by choosing friends who are like ourselves
for ourselves and our children. Finally, in the political realm, in her
account, we secure political rights, like the rights to vote and hold
office, and also private rights, like the right to marry whom we please.
The public sphere is also the arena for conversations with strangers
and for epic action that brings glory to the actors.
Arendt’s central concern in The Human Condition was to translate
an epic approach to politics into a democratic context. Democratic
political agents must construct a common world out of difference and
speak to one another qua men and not qua members of society (HC
). In a democracy, the ability to “fight a full-fledged political battle”
(HC ) consists of articulating “one’s own ideas about the possibilities of democratic government under modern conditions,” and of
“propos[ing] a transformation of political institutions” (HC ).
Most important, political action in a democracy is the opposite of
what we do as members of society, which is merely to “defend economic interests,” ask for “due consideration of vital interests” (MDT
), and function as “interest parties” (HC ). In Arendt’s view, only
nonheroic economic and “vital” interests were at stake in Little Rock.
In short, Arendt criticizes the actions of the African Americans involved in Little Rock as failures of citizenship. Their “nonpolitical”
actions in Little Rock caused a crisis that could be solved, she argued,
only by converting the public to new citizenly practices of tact and
restraint. If the U.S. democracy were to succeed at its new post-
constitution, developing enough trust and stability to preserve
democracy, its citizens would heroically have to surrender their concern with social issues. Only this genteel mode of citizenship, she believed, could convert long-standing divisions into the stuff of public
debate and also preserve the public sphere.
Ellison disagreed with Arendt’s account of Little Rock and democratic citizenship and twice responded publicly to her article, presenting a different take on problems like distrust, and on their solution.
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In an interview with Robert Penn Warren he remarked, “I believe
that one of the important clues to the meaning of [American Negro]
experience lies in the idea, the ideal of sacrifice. Hannah Arendt’s failure to grasp the importance of this ideal among Southern Negroes
caused her to fly way off into left field in her ‘Reflections on Little
Rock.’” He continues:
[S]he has absolutely no conception of what goes on in the minds of
Negro parents when they send their kids through those lines of hostile people. Yet they are aware of the overtones of a rite of initiation
which such events actually constitute for the child, a confrontation of
the terrors of social life with all the mysteries stripped away. And in
the outlook of many of these parents (who wish the problem didn’t
exist), the child is expected to face the terror and contain his fear and
anger precisely because he is a Negro American. Thus he’s required to
master the inner tensions created by his racial situation, and if he gets
hurt—then his is one more sacrifice. (WS ‒)2
Ellison had developed the concepts of ritual and sacrifice at length in
his novel Invisible Man, and amplified his accounts of both terms
in his many essays; these concepts were the foundation for a provocative account of democracy.3 But just how are ritual and sacrifice relevant to an analysis of Little Rock, or of democratic citizenship?
Democracy puts its citizens under a strange form of psychological
pressure by building them up as sovereigns and then regularly undermining each citizen’s experience of sovereignty. Ellison explicated
what it is like to be an individual in a democratic world of strangers,
where large-scale events are supposed to arise out of one’s own consent and yet never really do.4 He recognized that every human life is
full of rituals that initiate people into the symbol world, ideals, and
political structure of their community. These are the link between
any particular life and the larger political structure. The rituals may be
as overt as the requirement that students say the Pledge of Allegiance
in school every day or as little noticed as the adult habit of asking a
child upon a first meeting, “What’s your name and how old are you?”
(CE ).5 For Ellison, that particular ritual at least partially explains
the modern concern with identity. Similarly, a ritual may be as obviously political as one’s first trip to the polls, or may (wrongly) seem to
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be merely social, like getting drunk legally at the age of twenty-one.
But since the purpose of rituals is to create, justify, and maintain particular social arrangements, they are the foundation also of political
structures, and an individual comes to know intimately central aspects
of the overall form of his community by living through them. Significantly, since every ritual is for Ellison also a form of initiation, or
reinitiation, children are not exempt.6
In the moment that Hazel and Elizabeth, two teenagers, met in the
public square, neither was inventing her form of behavior. Each had
already been initiated into the requirements of adult life in the South.
In the Battle of Little Rock, they were simply tested once more to see
how well they had learned their lessons. Elizabeth knew the drill and
was lucky that she did. This is the force of Ellison’s argument to Warren that the parents of the Little Rock Nine understood how integral
to childhood are rituals initiating the child into the symbol world and
ideals of adults, and so also into adult politics. Whereas Arendt developed a political theory that might protect children from politics, by
transforming politics into an epic arena for full-grown warriors only,
Ellison has a more tragic vision: rituals to solidify social order inevitably involve children in politics, however much one might wish
the case otherwise.
Of all the rituals relevant to democracy, sacrifice is preeminent.
No democratic citizen, adult or child, escapes the necessity of losing
out at some point in a public decision. “It is our fate as human beings,” Ellison writes, “always to give up some good things for other
good things, to throw off certain bad circumstances only to create
others” (CE ).7 But sacrifice is a special sort of problem in a
democracy. Democracies are supposed to rest on consent and open
access to happiness for their citizens. In the dreamscape of democracy,
for instance à la Rousseau, every citizen consents to every policy with
glad enthusiasm. No one ever leaves the public arena at odds with the
communal choice; no one must accept political loss or suffer the imposition of laws to which she has not consented. But that is a dream.
An honest account of collective democratic action must begin by
acknowledging that communal decisions inevitably benefit some
citizens at the expense of others, even when the whole community
generally benefits. Since democracy claims to secure the good of all
citizens, those people who benefit less than others from particular
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political decisions, but nonetheless accede to those decisions, preserve the stability of political institutions. Their sacrifice makes collective democratic action possible. Democracy is not a static end state
that achieves the common good by assuring the same benefits or the
same level of benefits to everyone, but rather a political practice by
which the diverse negative effects of collective political action, and
even of just decisions, can be distributed equally, and constantly redistributed over time, on the basis of consensual interactions.8 The
hard truth of democracy is that some citizens are always giving things
up for others. Only vigorous forms of citizenship can give a polity the
resources to deal with the inevitable problem of sacrifice.
As we shall see, one of the achievements of the protagonist of Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, is to develop criteria for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate forms of sacrifice, and also to outline a form
of citizenship that helps citizens generate trust enough among themselves to manage sacrifice. Here it is necessary rather to outline the
conceptual bases of such a citizenship. Most important, recognition
of the necessary fact of loss and disappointment in democratic politics vitiates any effort, such as Arendt’s, to hold the social firmly separate from the political. As citizens struggle over political questions,
they will necessarily come to understand how political choices affect
social experience. The site of sacrifice is between the social world—
of custom and of mental, physical, and economic harm from other
citizens—and the political world of institutions and practices for
the sake of which one wants to master that harm. Thus Ellison says to
Warren of the African American parents behind the events at Little
Rock, “We learned about forbearance and forgiveness in that same
school, and about hope too. So today we sacrifice, as we sacrificed
yesterday, the pleasure of personal retaliation in the interest of the common
good” (WS ; emphasis added). The initiation of citizens into public
life entails pains and disappointments that, though generated in the
public sphere, are experienced in the social and personal realms. No
wonder, then, that Ellison, in powerful contrast to Arendt, so frequently uses the term “socio-political.”
In Ellison’s view, African Americans had, within the confines of a
citizenship of acquiescence, developed powerful insights about democracy based on this recognition of the inevitable blending of social and
political. Because African American parents had long recognized the
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centrality of sacrifice to their experience of life in America, they
found it necessary to cultivate in their children habits for dealing with
the sacrifices that would come their way. They felt obliged, according to Ellison, to teach their children that the political and legal
worlds are imbricated in a social context (sometimes of terror) that
constrains the possibilities for action supposedly protected by law.
These parents also taught their children both that they would have to
pay a social price for exercising the democratic political instrument
provided them by legal institutions, and that the use of the democratic
political instrument and its preservation were worth that price. The
ability to make such a sacrifice constituted, for Ellison, “the basic, implicit heroism of people who must live within a society without recognition, real status, but who are involved in the ideals of that society and who
are trying to make their way, trying to determine their true position
and their rightful position within it” (WS ; emphasis added). The
sacrifices of African Americans living in a segregated polity were sufficiently extreme to constitute scapegoating in Ellison’s terms rather
than legitimate sacrifice, and yet, he argued, they nonetheless revealed a truth that applies to all democratic citizens: the political
world cannot be entirely separated from the social world, and learning how to negotiate the losses one experiences at the hands of the
public is fundamental to becoming a political actor, not only for minorities suffering political abuses, but for all citizens. For Ellison, as
not for Arendt, the Little Rock parents were heroes. They were acting politically, even in Arendt’s own terms, for, as Ellison describes
them, they were illustrating ideas about how a democratic community might organize itself. They were providing rich lessons in citizenship by revealing the sacrifices citizens make for each other and
the necessary connections between the social and the political.
On Ellison’s reading of the events of September , the figure of
Elizabeth Eckford brought before the public eye not only the truth
about then existing modes of citizenship but also the glimmerings of
a new account of democratic agency. Her parents and those of the
other children were enduring social abuse—the taunts and threats addressed to their children—and asking their children, many of whom
had wanted to attend Central High over their objections, to endure
too, in order to render functional a legal system that had recently
banned the legal imposition of segregation on schools. They suffered
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the abuse of their children, a challenge “they wish[ed] didn’t exist,” to
help assure that the law worked. Elizabeth’s solitary walk was one
more sacrifice. In the face of disagreement she sought forms of political action that might generate enough political friendship to secure
a democratic legal system and convert the distrust arising from political disappointment into trust.
Which account of democracy and citizenship, Arendt’s or Ellison’s, is the more accurate analysis of the events at Central High and
their political significance?
The story of Little Rock, briefly, is this.9 In the spring of the
Little Rock school board formulated, and was required by courts to
abide by, a plan for integrating Central High School the following September. Over the summer many African American students
applied for admission to Central, very often against their parents’
wishes, and nine students were finally selected by school authorities.10
As the NAACP was readying the students, with extra academic training, to enter Central, Governor Orval Faubus worked to pass new
legislation reinstating segregation in the state’s schools, and citizen
groups organized against the projected opening of an integrated Central High. (Strangely, several other schools in Arkansas had been integrated in preceding years without incident.) On September , the day
before school was to start, National Guardsmen, under the supervision of the State of Arkansas, surrounded Central on Faubus’s orders. He announced on television that this was his response to warnings that carloads of white supremacists were headed to Little Rock;
he also announced that on the next day Central High School would
be off-limits to black students, and Horace Mann, the black school,
would be off-limits to white students.
Central High sat empty on September , but the Little Rock school
superintendent reasserted his local authority and, rescheduling the
opening for the fourth, authorized proceeding with the integration
plan. When the morning of the fourth arrived, so did large crowds,
watching and waiting as the guardsmen began to let a few white
students through their ranks to the school. Then Elizabeth Eckford,
the first black student, arrived. As the crowd surged around her with
curses and cries that she be lynched—radios reported, “A Negro girl
is being mobbed at Central High”—she walked the length of the mob
to reach the school entrance (LSLR ). She had seen the white stu-
:
dents enter between the ranks of guardsmen but, when she also tried
to pass through, the soldiers thrust their bayonets at her chest. She
tried twice before turning and returning, passing again along the
whole length of the crowd, to the bus stop, where she sat. There Benjamin Fine, a white reporter for the New York Times, sat down with
her, putting his arm around her. With a white woman he tried to help
Elizabeth escape, first by cab (the mob prevented this) and then at last
by bus. This was the first event in what has come to be called “The
Battle of Little Rock,” where victory was determined, though the
fighting not ended, by the arrival of federal troops (as distinct from
the guardsmen) on September . “Sure we’re in Central. But how
did we get in?” one of the students said, on the twenty-fifth. “We got
in, finally, because we were protected by paratroops. Some victory!”
(LSLR ). This student regretted that the law could not prevail
simply through the ordinary interaction of citizens.
Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas State Conference of
NAACP branches, gives an account of the events at Little Rock, and
some of the negotiations of legal authority involved in them, that
confirms Ellison’s analysis of both the centrality of sacrifice to democratic politics and the close relationship between sacrifice and democratic legal authority. On the afternoon of the third, the school superintendent Virgil Blossom called a meeting of leading African
American citizens in Little Rock along with the children’s parents
and “instructed the parents not to accompany their children the next
morning when they were scheduled to enter Central. ‘If violence
breaks out,’ the Superintendent told them, ‘it will be easier to protect
the children if the adults aren’t there’” (LSLR ). The parents were
extremely troubled by this—Superintendent Blossom had not explained how the children would be protected—but they agreed. Bates
was also worried by the instructions and, doing what she could to
provide protection for the children while also following the superintendent’s orders, she spent the night making phone calls: first, to a
white minister to ask if he could round up colleagues to accompany
the children in place of the parents; second, to the police to ask that
they accompany the children as close to the school as Faubus’s National Guardsmen would permit; third to the parents to tell them not
to send their children straight to school but rather to the ministers and
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police. The Eckfords had no phone, so Daisy missed them, but planned
to go by their house early enough in the morning to fill them in.
Then, after a late night, she overslept. In the morning, not knowing
of the new arrangements, the Eckfords simply followed the superintendent’s instructions and sent Elizabeth to school alone.
After being mobbed, Elizabeth slipped inside herself, remaining
there wordless during all of the news reports in the following days,
screaming at night in her dreams (LSLR ). When she began to talk
again, she described the morning of September . Her focus is on her
parents:
While I was pressing my black and white dress—I had made it to wear
on the first day of school—my little brother turned on the TV set.
They started telling about a large crowd gathered at the school. The
man on TV said he wondered if we were going to show up that morning. Mother called from the kitchen, where she was fixing breakfast,
“Turn that TV off !” She was so upset and worried. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, “Mother, don’t worry.”
Dad was walking back and forth, from room to room, with a sad
expression. He was chewing on his pipe and he had a cigar in his hand,
but he didn’t light either one. It would have been funny, only he was
so nervous.
Before I left home Mother called us into the living room. She said
we should have a word of prayer. . . . Then I caught the bus and got
off a block from the school. . . .
Someone shouted, “Here she comes, get ready.” I moved away
from the crowd on the sidewalk and into the street. If the mob came
at me, I could then cross back over so the guards could protect me.
The crowd moved in closer and then began to follow me. . . . They
moved closer and closer. Somebody started yelling, “Lynch her!
Lynch her!” . . . Someone hollered, “Drag her over to this tree! Let’s
take care of the nigger.”
[Then Elizabeth walked to the school, could not get in, and returned to the bus stop, where she was helped onto a bus.]
I can’t remember much about the bus ride, but the next thing I remember I was standing in front of the School for the Blind where
Mother works. . . . Mother was standing at the window with her
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head bowed, but she must have sensed I was there because she turned
around. She looked as if she had been crying, and I wanted to tell her
I was all right. But I couldn’t speak. She put her arms around me and
I cried. (LSLR )
Elizabeth’s parents obeyed Superintendent Blossom’s instructions not
to accompany their daughter in order to support the rule of law and
the institutions that were purportedly available to help all citizens obtain their democratic rights, and which claimed to offer all citizens
equal protection. The result was psychological terror for them and for
their daughter, which was endured in hope of future benefit. This
constitutes sacrifice. Ellison was right to identify this as a central feature of these political events.
Those involved in events on the ground knew that they were negotiating sacrifices demanded by the rule of law, as their own words
reveal. One exchange, between Daisy Bates and the father of one of
the students, even indicates the degree to which the superintendent’s
orders were equated with the law of the land. On September , the
night before the students were to reenter the school with the protection of the st Airborne Division, Daisy Bates went to visit one of
the families. She found an angry father, unwilling to let his daughter
face the mobs again. When Bates, “in [her] most pleasant, friendliest
voice, and trying to look at him instead of the gun, . . . said that the
children were to be at [her] house by eight-thirty the next morning,
and that those were the instructions of Superintendent Blossom,” the
father answered, “I don’t care if the President of the United States
gave you those instructions! . . . I won’t let Gloria go. She’s faced two
mobs and that’s enough” (LSLR ‒). Here was a father who explicitly viewed the sacrifices demanded of him and his daughter as
originating from the demands of legal authority.
These are the sacrifices Arendt did not see—one father pacing
with pipe in mouth and cigar in hand; another ready to throw the legal system to the winds—when she chastised Elizabeth Eckford’s parents and the “absent representatives of the NAACP” for allowing
Elizabeth to go to Central High alone, and when she insisted that they
were not acting politically. The invisibility of their sacrifice made the
NAACP representatives seem “absent” when they were not. Their
invisibility in turn ensured the invisibility of those whom they repre-
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sented. Rushing around at midnight to find white ministers to accompany the children to school instead of their parents, they were unable to shed public light on their situation or on that of the children
and parents. Indeed, in Invisible Man, invisibility regularly surrounds
the experience of sacrifice without recognition or honor. Ellison,
by invoking the idea of sacrifice in a discussion of Little Rock in his
Robert Penn Warren interview, suggests that the source of this invisibility was not merely the failure of one theorist to see individual
sacrifice but, more broadly, the general absence from democratic
practice of a language to comprehend sacrifice, or the losses and disappointments people accept for the sake of maintaining the communal agreements that constitute legality.
A language of sacrifice did, however, exist on the ground; citizens
of Little Rock could remark, “We’ve had the Constitution since
. . . Last night they came into our neighborhood and rocked
our homes, breaking windows and all that. We’ve taken a lot because we
didn’t want to hurt the chances of Negro kids, but I doubt whether the Negroes
are going to take much more without fighting back. I think I’ll take the rest
of the day off and check my shotgun and make sure it’s in working
condition” (LSLR ; emphasis added). But the public language of
political theory, which can directly interact with policy, did not reflect
a precise awareness of the practical sacrifices involved in the production of democratic agreement and laws. As a result, political theory
was not in a position to offer a full account of democratic citizenship
or of the full range of potential citizenly action. Ellison’s accuracy in
analyzing the events in Little Rock points to theoretical work that still
needs to be done.
Both Arendt and Ellison, then, treat the Battle of Little Rock as an
occasion to inquire how to develop habits of democratic citizenship
for a passage beyond exclusion, domination, acquiescence, and a
hypocritical “oneness.” But each theorist of democracy offers different suggestions for how to develop new habits for interacting with
strangers. For Arendt, citizens should focus on reforming political institutions, ensuring their inclusiveness, and maintaining public peace
by defining some questions as outside of politics. For Ellison, in contrast, the evolution of a newly inclusive citizenship required addressing those aspects of democratic decision making that the dream of
unity had previously hidden: loss and disappointment. This new cit-
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izenship would also have to address those phenomena that follow
from loss and disappointment, namely resentment and distrust. Could
diverse citizens, he asks throughout his writing, find ways to talk and
act that could convert loss into a freely given gift to be reciprocated,
and that could transform distrust into trust? First, we must directly
address the question of what is at stake in acknowledging sacrifice to
be a central feature of democratic citizenship.
S
Sacrifice and Citizenship
- the citizens of the United States
with the prospect of reconstitution. New citizenly habits would be
necessary to produce a public sphere in which “wholeness,” not “oneness,” would be the objective. Ellison showed that those new habits
needed, above all else, to include methods for dealing with political
loss and for developing forms of interaction among citizens that would
allow for the constant redistribution of patterns of sacrifice. But how
important, in fact, is this dynamic to the democratic tradition?
Ellison’s intuition that sacrifice is fundamental to democratic citizenship was absolutely accurate.1 He zeroed in on a central and neglected term in the social contract tradition. The enlightenment
philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all draw on the same Old Testament story in grounding their accounts of consent and political obligation. And it is the story not of
Isaac, in which Abraham’s mere willingness to sacrifice his son satisfied the Lord, but of Jepthah ( Judges ).
Jepthah, offspring of an illegitimate union, is cast out of the Israelite tribe, but in exile develops into the greatest warrior in the region.
When Israel faces an overwhelming military adversary, the Israelites
ask Jepthah to fight for them, promising that, in return, they will give
him rule over the tribe. He returns and turns the tide of the battle, but
in the middle of fighting vows to God that, if given the victory, he
will sacrifice the first thing he sees when he gets home. Is there any
need to say what happens next? First out to greet him is his daughter.
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We might have expected this. Jepthah is torn about what to do—
whether he should carry out the sacrifice he has sworn to Yahweh and
kill her—when his daughter saves him: “My father, if you have opened
your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to what has gone out of
your mouth” (:).2 Importantly, she insists that she have the chance
to honor her own death before it comes. She will allow herself to be
sacrificed provided that she can first go with her friends to the hills
for two months to lament her virgin death. How painful, then, that
the text never names her.
Jepthah thus gains his citizenship among the Israelites through
military heroism, but cements a system of promise and consent only
on the basis of his daughter’s self-sacrifice. For Hobbes, Jepthah’s
promise to God is paradigmatic of the promises that underlie consentbased politics, but the daughter’s self-sacrifice is the basic model for
the relationship between citizen and sovereign (L .). Locke, too,
treats Jepthah’s story as a model for a political order founded on contract (First Treatise, sec. ; Second Treatise, sec. ).3 Beneath the
promise and consent that found the social contract is the most extreme loss. Ellison’s analysis thus unearths, through astute observation
of practice, the principle buried beneath the operations of a consentbased politics.4 James Madison understood what was at stake: “In absolute Monarchies, the prince is sufficiently neutral towards his subjects, but frequently sacrifices their happiness to his ambition or his
avarice. In small Republics, the sovereign will is sufficiently controuled from such a sacrifice of the entire Society, but it is not sufficiently neutral towards the parts composing it.”5 In large republics, too,
some citizens are always giving things up for others. The question
Madison hoped to answer was how to make this manageable.
Recent political analysts have noticed the importance of military
sacrifice, in particular, to modern forms of democratic citizenship. Judith Shklar was one of many recent commentators to note that the
military service of African American men in the Civil War and World
War II was the most effective fillip to dramatic changes in civil rights
in the United States.6 Ellison’s point, in contrast, is that military sacrifice is only the most dramatic and honored form of an activity that
in fact occurs less conspicuously throughout democratic life. In Ellison’s analysis of Little Rock and of the photo of Elizabeth Eckford,
he attends to the sacrifices not only of sons but also of daughters in
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order to expand our ability to see quotidian sacrifices and ordinary
benefactions.
In chapter I described an encounter between Daisy Bates of the
NAACP in Little Rock and an angry, armed father who did not want
his daughter to face the mobs again. In response to Bates’s request that
the daughter be dropped off at her house the following morning, the
father refused. But he changed his mind: “[The next morning,] Mr.
Ray, shy and smiling, led Gloria into the house. He looked down at
his daughter with pride. ‘Here, Daisy, she’s yours. She’s determined
to go’” (LSLR ‒). Like Jepthah’s daughter, Gloria chose to sacrifice herself to fortify for others the legal order her father was willing
to thwart. Ellison’s recognition of the centrality of sacrifice to democratic politics leads directly to an explanation of the power of the photos
of Elizabeth Eckford with which we began. “Here, Daisy, she’s yours.”
This might have been said of Elizabeth. The famous photos show
us yet another sacrifice of a daughter to solidify new promises and
democratic contracts. One might learn yet more from the story of
Jepthah’s daughter’s self-sacrifice about the experience of women
in democratic polities, but for the time being the point is to look beyond the battlefield to other moments of sacrifice.7 Discourses identifying and recognizing sacrifice are common for soldiers, firemen,
and policemen;for all of these, Jepthah’s military sacrifice is the model.
Like him, generals, fire chiefs, and police heads often win leadership
roles in their communities. The daughter’s self-sacrifice, however, is
the model for a whole other range of anonymous loss in democratic
politics, which, as it happens, democratic citizens generally do not see
clearly; nor do they honor it. And just as the political theory of the
s was not equipped to acknowledge the sacrifices of Little Rock,
neither do our present terms of political analysis come to grips with
this kind of sacrifice.
Consider a more recent example from two New York Times articles
written in a period of recent prosperity. One is about loss, the other
about gain, but both stories arose from a single event. On June , ,
citizens of the United States woke to news of the first large rise in unemployment in eight years. This growth in joblessness had a history.
Between January and April the Federal Reserve had, for the
good of the country, raised interest rates several times in hope of slowing the economy. Joblessness was increased by design and justified by
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the idea of the common good, which shows that political decisions
can impose loss not by accident, but by intention. Indeed, the intentions behind the Fed’s decisions in the spring of had developed
as early as (at least) when economist Milton Friedman, as president of the American Economics Association (but not yet a Nobel
laureate), addressed that group ex cathedra and argued for the existence of a natural rate of unemployment, or a “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment”(NAIRU).8 This phrase designates the
precise level of unemployment that is thought by many economists
to ensure stable, nonexcessive levels of inflation. Friedman argued, in
macroeconomic terms, that attempts to reduce unemployment below
a “natural rate equilibrium” would “appear successful in the short
run, but would soon generate accelerating inflation, whose intolerability would force a retreat [in unemployment figures] to the natural
rate.”9 He added the microeconomic argument that, when unemployment falls beneath a certain level, labor shortages generate wage increases, which in turn spark inflation. In other words, some amount
of unemployment above that produced by people’s movements from
job to job is good for the economy as a whole. In the early s the
natural rate of unemployment was thought to be percent. Anyone
who advocated a policy to lower the rate any further had to argue
against nature itself.
For nearly thirty years, political leaders and Federal Reserve bankers
have feared to let unemployment fall below its designated “natural”
level. But events have regularly foiled economists’ predictions; levels
of unemployment have repeatedly sunk below the assigned natural
rate without being followed by dramatic inflation. As a result economists have constantly revised their estimates of the natural rate of unemployment: in , the natural rate of unemployment was generally assessed at percent but by economists George Akerlof,
William Dickens, and George Perry estimated it in the range of .
to . percent. Indeed, their estimates were timely: by September
unemployment fell to . percent, again without inflation. This
brings us back to the Fed’s decision in the spring of . In January
most estimates put the natural rate of unemployment at .‒
percent; the drop to . percent set off an alarm.10 When the Federal
Reserve raised interest rates to cut back on jobs, it acted in accord
with nearly thirty years of policy.
:
Let’s presume for the moment that the natural rate of unemployment is a valid ideal. At percent, this would mean that the best interests of the country as a whole dictate that seven million citizens
look for work without success, another four million work part-time
involuntarily, and another , be counted as discouraged workers.11 Optimistic public policy does indeed construct notions of the
common good on the basis of differential distributions of loss and
gain. The phrase “for the good of the country” says everything fundamental about democratic decision making. Collaborative action
requires sacrifice from one or another citizen at particular times, and
the preposition “for” betrays the phrase as plea, exhortation, and
finally justification. But however much increased unemployment
might benefit the polity as a whole, the effects of unemployment on
those who lose jobs cannot be easily undone. How are citizens to
think about the fact that a regime constructed for the good of all (liberal democracy) must make day-to-day decisions that are better for
some or that are directly hurtful for others?
Since sacrifice is ubiquitous in democratic life, and the polity often makes decisions with which one disagrees, all citizens must confront the paradox that they have been promised sovereignty and rarely
feel it. Herein lies the single most difficult feature of life in a democracy. Democratic citizens are by definition empowered only to be
disempowered. As a result, democratic citizenship requires rituals to
manage the psychological tension that arises from being a nearly
powerless sovereign. For a long time, in this country, the solution to
this paradoxical fact that most democratic citizens are, at the end of
the day, relatively powerless sovereigns was the two-pronged citizenship of domination and acquiescence. These old bad habits dealt with
the inevitable fact of loss in political life by assigning to one group all
the work of being sovereign, and to another group most of the work
of accepting the significant losses that kept the polity stable. This approach to the place of loss in politics is a breeding ground for distrust.
The challenge set to us by , then, is to develop healthier habits
for handling the problem of loss in politics, and other roads to empowerment.
The front page of the New York Times business section, which reported the June rise in unemployment, separated the stories of
loss and gain. The left-hand, or less significant column, reported,
:
“The nation’s private sector employers shed , jobs in May. It
was the largest drop in more than eight years and the first decline since
the economy began to soar in the mid-’s. The unemployment
rate edged up to . percent from . percent, with blacks and Hispanics absorbing most of the loss” ( June , ; emphasis added). On the
right-hand side of the same page, the lead article spun the story thus:
“The Nasdaq composite index soared . percent yesterday, ending
its best week ever, as investors cheered data suggesting that the nation’s economy is slowing and the Federal Reserve may be almost done
raising interest rates.” This headlined article was illustrated with a
photograph of frantic traders on the market floor. How differently
these two groups of citizens—marginally employed laborers on the
one hand and investors on the other—experienced the “common
good” as served up by the Federal Reserve!
Significantly, the stories of loss and gain were not merely separated
but also prioritized. The front page of the paper had also made the
stories visually separate from one another, but had introduced them
as if to give the story of increased unemployment greater weight: it is
the right-hand-column story, and the information about the increase
in the stock market is a small inset box, marked off with a black outline. If one looks closely, however, both stories are continued not in
the front section of the paper, but in the business section. The story
on unemployment, which looks like the lead story on the front page,
is demoted to the twenty-third page of the business section while the
story about Nasdaq is continued on page of the business section.
The business section tells the truth about editorial priorities. There
the lead story was the positive outcome, the soaring stock market. But
the story about the laborers absorbing losses has the deeper significance. At the end of Invisible Man, the protagonist realizes that all the
people he had idolized had been sacrificing him to achieve goods for
themselves or others; he falls into a troubled sleep and has a bizarre
dream of castration. Toward the end of the dream, he addresses all the
figures who had abused him about the blood dripping from his
wound: “But if you’ll look, you’ll see . . . It’s not invisible . . . there
hang not only my generations wasting upon the water . . . But your
sun . . . And your moon . . . Your world . . . There’s your universe,
and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you’ve
made, all you’re going to make. Now laugh, you scientists. Let’s hear
. Front page of New York Times business section from June ,
. Front page of New York Times from June ,
:
you laugh!” (IM ).12 The blood that drains from him constitutes
the world of his tormentors and their only legacy. So too the sacrifices of some citizens are the bedrock of other citizens’ lives. Citizens
of democracies are often implored to realize that they are all in the
same boat. Ellison instead asks us to recognize that our fellow citizens
are the boat, and we in turn the planks for them.13
Side-by-side but not touching, what are these citizens—laborers
and investors—to each other? Inevitably, they are one another’s supports, though in diverse ways and at different moments. When citizens find themselves newly jobless as a result of collective decisions
and accept their losses without violence or rebellion, they grant their
fellow citizens stability, a gift of no small account. Are they owed
something in return? If so, what? And by whom? Citizens who benefit from the stable polity find themselves, on this view, in debt to
the newly jobless. Now, clearly, not all instances of law-abidingness
constitute the same level of gift. When a citizen gives up driving
miles per hour, for the sake of sustaining community norms about
safety and fuel efficiency, the loss is not substantial. A democratic
polity must develop criteria for assessing different levels of loss and for
distinguishing between reasonable and unreasonable claims on this
front. What distinguishes obedience to policies whose aim is to produce unemployment from acquiescence to laws that slow down speedy
drivers? As Shklar points out, being able to work and having work are
defining elements of citizenship in the United States. Marginally employed citizens who peaceably accept the Federal Reserve’s policies
to nudge up unemployment suffer a loss that touches not merely idiosyncratic pleasures but also a primary good, their standing as citizens
within the polity.14
Ellison challenges us not only to see our comforts as constructed
out of the sacrifices of others, but also to develop terms for assessing
how significant these sacrifices are. On the same page or in the same
city, alongside each other without touching, citizens of different
classes, backgrounds, and experiences are inevitably related to each
other in networks of mutual benefaction, despite customary barriers
between them, and despite our nearly complete lack of awareness, or
even disavowal, of these networks. This relationship is citizenship,
and a democratic polity, for its own long-term health, requires practices for weighing the relative force of benefactions and for respond-
:
ing to them. Ellison was right, then: democratic citizenship should
properly involve a discourse about loss and mutual benefaction. But
such a discourse confronts significant philosophical and practical difficulties. It requires developing terms not only for assessing relative
levels of sacrifice but also for analyzing the intersection of social experiences and politics, and this leads us onto the terrain of political
emotion.
Social or economic loss becomes political when citizens believe
themselves disadvantaged by a collective decision. Regardless of
whether their beliefs are reasonable, they will be registered in negative emotions like anger, resentment, disappointment, and despair.
These bring with them psychological stress for the individuals and,
worse still for the polity, they sow the seeds of distrust. One can imagine three different ways in which political loss might manifest itself in
negative emotions within the citizenry: () citizens may reasonably
believe they have suffered losses from collective decisions and feel
anger about those losses, even though the loss has been reasonably
enough demanded of them; () citizens may reasonably believe they
have suffered losses and feel anger about those losses in cases where
the losses have not been reasonably imposed; and () citizens may
unreasonably believe they suffer losses and may feel anger over what
appears to them as a loss, even if it cannot reasonably be described as
such. Criteria for differentiating reasonable from unreasonable feelings of loss are crucial to the effort of converting negative emotions
like anger, resentment, and disappointment into less painful states,
but they are not in themselves enough to convert distrust into trust.
Again, let’s take the policies of the Federal Reserve as an example.
The policy of raising interest rates in face of an unemployment rate
of . percent is justifiable enough; one might explain it to the marginally employed as a reasonable policy for the common good and no
doubt gain the assent of many to it. Yet such marginally employed citizens could perfectly well assent rationally to a policy for the common
good, and nonetheless feel anger at having to be the people who bear
the costs of preserving the polity as a whole. Their judgment of the
common good would simply have come into irreconcilable conflict
with their opinion about their personal good. The divergence between the two goods may well jeopardize their own sense of security
within the state.
:
Even in cases where a citizen believes that the loss she suffers is reasonably imposed, her increased sense of vulnerability will be a breeding ground for distrust. The emotions of anger, resentment, and disappointment that attend political loss arise not merely on the basis of
opinions about particular policy decisions but also as judgments about
a citizen’s hope for future security. Democratic citizenship must involve practices not only for assessing whether a given experience is
reasonably identified as a loss and whether that sacrifice is reasonably
requested but also for responding even to those emotions that remain
after the criteria of reasonableness have done their work. Such practices would address citizens’ fears about their own security within the
polity.
Why do such fears require a response?
Here let me take up the connection between political loss and
trust. Democracy depends on the ability of citizens to submit their
fates willingly to the hands of others, not only to their own representatives, but also to the politicians with whom their representatives debate in the assembly house. Is it reasonable for a citizen to accept the
uncertainty of representative democracy? Only if he trusts his fellow
citizens. When can a citizen trust his fellow citizens? Only when he
is not burned by collaborative action. If citizens are to maintain their
trust in the institutions of democratic life, they need to see a positive
connection between their political membership and their general
well-being. They can trust political institutions only if those are
worth something to them and do not generally work their harm. Disappointment and resentment, the aftereffects of loss, deplete the
reservoirs of trust needed to sustain democratic life. Since democratic
decision making necessarily brings about losses for some people, decision makers act responsibly only when they also develop techniques
for working through that loss and its emotional surround. A democracy needs forms for responding to loss that make it nonetheless
worthwhile or reasonable for citizens who have lost in one particular
moment to trust the polity—the government and their fellow citizens—for the future.15
Do policy makers who engineer loss say anything useful about accommodating the lived experience of loss within democratic politics?
The phrase “the common good” manages the problem of loss in politics simply by asking citizens to bear up in moments of disappoint-
:
ment, as does a strict Arendtian distinction between social and political realms. So it goes too in utilitarianism, or cost-benefit analysis. In
a utilitarian calculus, costs and benefits cancel each other out until
policy makers can see options that produce either net gains or net
losses; their job, then, is only to choose the net gain. The idea of “net
gain” erases the problem of loss by insisting that analysts proceed to
“the bottom line.” Democratic theory has, unfortunately, learned too
well how to protect itself from direct consideration of the nonaccidental losses that follow from political decisions. It ignores the complicated relationships among citizens, and this is a real problem. We now
see that citizenship, in contrast, is the practice of attending to the losses
that produce the bottom line, and of negotiating both our status as
one another’s mainstays and the need for taking turns at losses as well
as gains. Not only decision makers, but also citizens themselves have
to cope with the losses of others suffered for the good of the whole.
Since the entire citizenry is implicated in networks of gain and loss,
its members all share responsibility for resisting the corrosion of trust.
Here the central question emerges: What approach to loss in politics is compatible with working to sustain networks of democratic
trust over the long term? Trust is not something that politicians alone
can create. It grows only among citizens as they rub shoulders in daily
life—in supermarkets, at movie theaters, on buses, at amusement
parks, and in airports—and wherever they participate in maintaining
an institution, whether a school, a church, or a business. How can we
successfully generate trust in all these contexts?
It’s hard to imagine a moment in this democracy when politicians
and citizens are not lamenting the absence of a civic education in citizenly interaction. But this lament misdiagnoses the situation. In fact,
the United States does provide a forceful civic education. One political lesson is inscribed as deeply as possible into the hearts and minds
of all children. “Don’t talk to strangers.” Yet another childhood ritual,
this admonishment is the central tenet of our current education in
citizenship.
Again, the two stories in the business section illustrate the problem. They depict diverse groups affected by a single communal event
who share an experience and a memory. But the stories, running
along side-by-side without touching, seem related to each other like
the citizens. Saying comprehensively how they are involved with each
:
other is difficult, and citizens have also developed methods of ignoring each other and their mutual implication in one another’s experiences. The newspaper reports, like the citizens, don’t talk to each
other; they generate no language or conceptual space for relating the
winners and losers of communal decisions.16
The New York Times’ own analysts eventually became aware of this
blind spot. When the scenario—of increased unemployment leading
to joy on the trading floors—repeated itself several times in the spring
of , analysts began to notice the ethical awkwardness. A May
article entitled, “More Bad News, and the Stock Markets Are Happy
to Hear It,” quoted the president of a money management firm as saying, “We’re at this seemingly anomalous situation where stocks rise
on bad news.”17 Awareness of the interrelatedness of different citizens
here, as too often, elicits only curiosity and confusion and not concentrated ethical and political thought. We have no nuanced language
for understanding the coincidence of good and bad news in democratic life. When it comes to seeing how strangers are related to each
other, we are aphasic.
The ancient Greeks encouraged one another to be hospitable to
strangers on the ground that any of them might turn out to be a god
in costume. We teach our children, “Don’t talk to strangers!” in order
to protect them from dangers. But democracy requires vulnerability
before one’s fellow citizens. How can we teach children, as they begin to near adulthood, to develop countervailing habits that allow
them to talk to strangers? And what should these habits be like anyway? These are important questions in a democracy where our fellow
citizens are strangers to us.
‒ :
. I am grateful to Patchen Markell for conversations on the subjects of agency
and control in relation to democratic citizenship.
. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War ..
. This is not a new story in U.S. politics. George Washington wore a suit made
of homespun cloth to his first inauguration in order to express his revolutionary
country’s economic independence from Britain (The Papers of George Washington,
Presidential Series, vol. [http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/presidency/inaugural/]; see
also C. W. Bowen, ed., The History of the Centennial Celebration of the Inauguration of
George Washington (New York, ). Robert Hayne, the Southern senator to
whom Webster made the famous reply discussed above, had for his own speech to
the Senate (presided over by John C. Calhoun) worn a “coarse homespun suit that
he had substituted for the hated broadcloth manufactured in the North” (Caro, The
Years of Lyndon Johnson, ).
. Although Arendt thought she was writing about the photo of Elizabeth Eckford in Little Rock, Arkansas, that appeared on the front page of the New York Times
on September , , the photo that she actually describes was the accompanying
photo of Dorothy Counts in Charlotte, North Carolina. It is the photo of Counts,
not of Eckford, that includes the “white friend of her father” to whom Arendt refers.
Arendt’s mistake has been frequently adopted by others on the basis of her authority. Also, it is important to point out a common misinterpretation of Arendt’s essay.
She is often seen as having criticized only the African American parents. In fact, she
also criticized the white parents for exploiting their children (RLR ).
The most helpful secondary materials on Arendt’s essay are Elisabeth YoungBruehl, Hannah Arendt (New Haven, ), –; D. S. Allen, “Law’s Necessary
Forcefulness,” Oklahoma City Law Review . (): –; S. Benhabib, The
Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, ); J. Bohman, “The
Moral Costs of Political Pluralism,” in Hannah Arendt, ed. L. May and J. Kohn
(Cambridge, Mass., ); L. J. Disch, “On Friendship in ‘Dark Times,’” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. B. Honig (University Park, Pa., ), –
; A. Norton, “Heart of Darkness,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt,
ed. Honig, –; E. M. Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge, ).
. Ellison also commented on Arendt’s article in “The World and the Jug,” New
Leader, Dec. , , which has since been reprinted in Collected Essays.
. As a novelist, Ellison was determined to achieve the “imaginative integration
of the total American experience” (“On Initiation Rites and Power,” CE ). He
invented narrative forms that connect individual psychic struggles to the larger
structures of American democracy, and also reveal the meanings of that connection. The arguments I make here about Ellison’s “conclusions” are based on read-
:
ing his two novels for the arguments constructed out of the interplay of characters
and then setting these arguments against those developed in his essays. This method
of reading mimics Ellison’s own. He and his letter-writing companion, Albert
Murray, discussed how to give the reader “an adventure” by “presenting process”
not “statements.” Thus, Ellison writes to Murray, “I would like more Emdee . . .
or Jaygee because with them Jack could arrive at his theories through conflict . . .
His ideas are not the usual ones . . . and I think much unrevealed revelation lies in
the story of how he attained this kind of transcendence” (R. Ellison and A. Murray, Trading Twelves [New York, ], ). Thus, I read Ellison’s novels seeking to
discern what the conflicts of ideas are; from there I try to assess what concerns on
the part of the author led to the focus on these particular conflicts. I never take the
words of any particular character as examples of Ellison’s opinions, unless they are
the words that have won some particular argument that his books are having with
themselves. I amplify my readings of his novels with reference to his essays.
. Both Meili Steele and Kenneth Warren have been building a body of work on
Ellison’s political ideas. See M. Steele, “Metatheory and the Subject of Democracy,”
New Literary History (): –; “Democratic Interpretation and the Politics of Difference,” Comparative Literature (): –; “Arendt versus Ellison
on Little Rock,” Constellations (): –; Kenneth Warren, “Ralph Ellison
and the Reconfiguration of Black Cultural Politics,” Yearbook of Research in English
and American Literature (): –; “‘As White as Anybody,’” New Literary
History (): –. There has also been a proliferation of free-standing pieces
on the subject: J. M. Albrecht, “Saying Yes and Saying No,” PMLA (): –
; T. Parrish, “Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Burke, and the Form of Democracy,” Arizona Quarterly ():–; Allen, “Law’s Necessary Forcefulness”;J. Callahan,
“Frequencies of Eloquence,” in New Essays on Invisible Man, ed. R. O’Meally
(Cambridge, ), –; B. Ostendorf, “Ralph Waldo Ellison,” in New Essays,
ed. O’Meally, –; S. E. Hyman, “Ralph Ellison in Our Time,” in Ralph Ellison,
ed. J. Hersey (Upper Saddle River, N.J., ), – (reprinted from New Leader
, no. [Oct. , ]: –); B. Foley, “Reading Redness,” Journal of Narrative
Theory . (): –.
On Ellison’s politics (in contrast to his theories of politics), see J. G. Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual (Chapel Hill, ).
The best places to start with criticism of Ellison are A. Nadel, Invisible Criticism
(Iowa City, ); K. Bentson, ed., Speaking for You (Washington, D.C., );
H. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago, ); H. L. Gates,
Jr., The Signifying Monkey (Oxford, ); L. Morel, ed., Raft of Hope (Lexington,
Ky., ).
The most helpful text on Ellison that I have found is B. Eddy, The Rites of Identity (PhD diss., Princeton University, ). She addresses sacrifice, tragedy, and
comedy in Ellison, as well as many of the other concepts that come up in his work.
‒ :
Except for Eddy, I have not yet come across a text that investigates Ellison’s idea of
sacrifice, the subject of this chapter.
. “Hidden Name and Complex Fate.”
. From T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Lord Raglan’s The Hero, Ellison took a
conviction that myth and ritual are fundamental to both human life and literature.
Ellison invokes the idea of ritual throughout his essays. For instance, in “The Myth
of the Flawed White Southerner,” he refers to himself as “a novelist interested in
that area of national life where political power is institutionalized and translated
into democratic ritual and national style” (CE ). To piece together Ellison’s account of ritual, see particularly “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity,”“Art of Fiction,”“Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” and “Initiation Rites
and Power.” See also Eddy, Rites.
. “Hidden Name and Complex Fate.”
. For related formulations of the idea of the democratic good, please see
W. Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison, ), –; and S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past, . Other theorists who draw our attention to discord, dissonance,
and the mongrel nature of democratic policy are Ben Barber and Bonnie Honig. I
have benefited substantially from the work of all four, as citations throughout this
text indicate.
Here is another section of the interview with Robert Penn Warren:
Warren: Here in the midst of what has been an expanding economy you
have a contracting economy for the unprepared, for the Negro.
Ellison: That’s the paradox. And this particularly explains something new
which has come into the picture; that is, a determination by the Negro no
longer to be the scapegoat, no longer to pay, to be sacrificed to—the inadequacies of other Americans. We want to socialize the cost. A cost has been
exacted in terms of character, in terms of courage, and determination, and
in terms of self-knowledge and self-discovery. Worse, it has led to social,
economic, political, and intellectual disadvantages and to a contempt even
for our lives. And one motive for our rejection of the old traditional role of
national scapegoat is an intensified awareness that not only are we being destroyed by the sacrifice, but that the nation has been rotting at its moral core.
(WS )
. This account derives entirely from Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock
(New York, ); cf. D. L. Chappell, Inside Agitators (Baltimore, 1994).
. There are some hints in the literature that integrationists preferred to start
integration with girls rather than boys, because of the inflammatory power of the
miscegenation issue. Of the Little Rock Nine, seven were young women.
: ‒
. We can tell that Ellison meant his term “sacrifice” to be used for political and
not only psychological analysis because he makes it the centerpiece of a criticism
of Hannah Arendt’s arguments about school desegregation and Little Rock Almost
everyone with whom I have discussed these materials has objected that the term
“sacrifice” does not properly belong to politics and is too dangerous to introduce
to political discussion. George Kateb, for instance, worries (in personal conversation) that the effect of the term “sacrifice” in political discussion is inevitably to set
the community above the individual, with dangerous consequences. My argument, however, is not that we should introduce sacrifice as an ethical term, but
rather that we must recognize how much of a role it is already playing, and has always played, in democratic politics. Despite general disavowals of the topic of sacrifice, the word comes up frequently in political theory and political discussions. In
fact, from a quick and casual survey, it seems that the majority of works published
in political theory use the term at some point. The point I make with Ellison is that
it is better to be honest about the political work being done by this idea, and to try
to figure out how to deal with it, than to ignore it. My discussion is not meant to
bring either military sacrifice or militarism to the fore; rather, in this chapter, I
point to all the ordinary, prosaic day-to-day sacrifices that go into keeping democracy running, and that also generally go unnoticed. The United States has a fairly
robust discourse of honor, recognition, and recompense for the sacrifices of soldiers, policemen, and firemen. We need some sort of analogous discourse, I am arguing, to help us deal with the sacrifices made by ordinary people.
Here and there in the political literature, one does find a recognition of the role
that the idea of sacrifice has played in democratic contexts. Interestingly, the term
appears with special frequency in discussions that also touch on race. W. Connolly
offers an extended discussion of the “ideology of sacrifice” as an example of how
citizens develop illusory ideological constructs to protect themselves from political
and civilizational realities in Appearance and Reality in Politics (Cambridge, ),
–, –. See also DeMott, The Trouble with Friendship, e.g., –; Honig,
Democracy and the Foreigner, e.g., ; Wolin, The Presence of the Past, .
. New Oxford Annotated Bible.
. Shakespeare’s Hamlet ..–, gives further proof of the widespread currency of the story of Jepthah in the early modern period:
Ham. O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!
Pol. What a treasure had he, my lord?
Ham. Why
One fair daughter and no more,
The which he loved passing well.
Pol. [Aside.] Still on my daughter.
Ham. Am I not in‚ the right, old Jephthah?
‒ :
Pol. If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter that I love
passing well.
Ham. Nay, that follows not.
For Locke, Jepthah’s relationship to God is a model for political action on the
part of democratic citizens. See also Locke II., . Peter Laslett writes in a note
on p. , “Locke evidently regarded the story of Jephthah as crucial to the scriptural foundations of his case about civil society and justice. Grotius and St. Augustine had used the Jephthah story for political analysis, and Locke may have had in
mind the Calvinist position expressed by Jurieu (, ) that the Judges, Jepthah
among them, represented a stage between the anarchy of primeval innocence and
established sovereignty, a stage which inevitably passed because of the effects of
the Fall.” Rousseau cites the Jepthah story in Of the Social Contract (bk. , chap. ).
Honig (Democracy and the Foreigner, ) offers an account via a discussion of Rousseau both of the role of sacrifice in the social contract theory and of the habits of
imagination that allow democratic citizens to ignore sacrifice.
. He is explicit about the role of sacrifice in constitutional founding in his essays. See, for instance, “Initiation Rites and Power.”
. James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” in Papers,
W. T. Hutchinson, R. Rutland, et al., eds. (Chicago, ), ., cited in E. Morgan, Inventing the People (New York, ), .
. Shklar, American Citizenship; D. R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (;
rev. ed. New York, ), chap. .
. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, –, offers a reading of the book of Ruth
that analyzes the figure of the female sacrificer in greater detail.
. My account of the history of this idea as well as my analysis of it derives from
James K. Galbraith, “Time to Ditch the NAIRU,” Journal of Economic Perspectives ,
no. (Winter ): –. For related accounts of the relationship between unemployment policy and citizenship, see Connolly, Appearance and Reality; Wolin,
The Presence of the Past, –, –, . Interestingly, there are parallels to Ellison’s language in Galbraith’s analysis of how the NAIRU policy has imposed loss:
“We cannot reject the possibility that macroeconomic policy has been in thrall to
the illusion of a supposedly objective, but in fact self-induced, decline in the trend
rate of productivity growth, and that we have been running from the phantom of
accelerating inflation for more than two decades. The result:a self-inflicted wound,
a sociopsychological disability of colossal proportions” (). On the relationship
between interest rates, the Federal Reserve, unemployment policy, and NAIRU,
see p. . Also, “The assignment of sole responsibility for anti-inflation policy to
the Federal Reserve, a de facto development that is technically illegal under the
Full Employment Act of , is a serious underlying problem. . . . One of the serious unintended consequences of economists’ preoccupation with NAIRU has
been to convey a message to political leaders that they need not feel any responsi-
: ‒
bility in this area, that the inflation-unemployment tradeoff can be fine-tuned with
interest rates by the Fed. It isn’t so” (). “Since Friedman’s speech, orthodox macroeconomics has virtually always leaned against policies to support full employment.
In spite of stagnant real wages, it has virtually never leaned the other way” ().
“When a higher NAIRU accompanies higher unemployment, it cuts against the
case for a policy of expansion, since a higher proportion of the existing unemployment is seen as necessary to preserve stable inflation. When unemployment is
falling, a downwardly sticky NAIRU bolsters the natural caution of many economists concerning progrowth policy intervention. In consequence, policymakers
are almost never presented with a clear case, based on natural rate analysis and supported by a consensus of NAIRU-adhering economists, for a proemployment policy” (). “The cost of unnecessarily high unemployment itself must therefore, to
some extent, rest on the conscience of the economics profession” ().
. Galbraith, “Time to Ditch,” .
. Source for the natural rate of unemployment in and early :
Robert J. Samuelson, “Our Lifetime Job Prospects,” Newsweek, June , .
. Galbraith, “Time to Ditch,” .
. Ellipses appear in the original and also indicate omissions of text.
. DeMott, The Trouble with Friendship, –, also criticizes the “same boat”
metaphor and provides some specific examples.
. See Shklar, American Citizenship, for an account of the centrality of military
service and employment to the status of citizens in the United States; Wolin, The
Presence of the Past, –.
. The arguments about trust in this paragraph rest on work done by Rogers
Smith in “Trust and Worth,” a paper given as the ISPS Charles E. Lindblom Lecture, . There he argues, “Accounts of peoplehood . . . become stories of trust,
stories told by leaders to persuade constituents that if they adhere to the political
community thus defined, they will be able to trust their compatriots, and particularly their
governors, to strive to advance their own interests, values, and identities. . . . the fundamental task facing the proponents of a particular conception of peoplehood is to
persuade its would-be loyal citizenry of the distinctive worth or value (however
defined) that can be realized by belonging to the community thus understood. . . .
In short, people-building requires stories of trust and worth” (; emphasis added).
. Annette Baier recounts that the lesson about not talking to strangers, a new
one for her when she moved from New Zealand to Britain and the United States,
led to her work on trust in Moral Prejudices, .
. M. Brick, “More Bad News, and the Stock Markets Are Happy to Hear It,”
New York Times, May , , sec. C. See also M. Hulbert, “Beneath the StockMarket Rebound, Hints of Trouble,” New York Times, May , , sec. . See
also J. H. Boyd, and R. Jagannathan, and J. Hu, “The Stock Market’s Reaction to
Unemployment News,” available at http://papers.nber.org/papers/W.
Aya Alaqrabawi
Professor Laden
Philosophy 104
08 September 2021
Paper Assignment #1
Upon reading the article, Aristotle states concepts about democracy that I found
to be compelling. Aristotle’s views on democracy conflicts with the ideas about that
specific notion compared to the general public. For instance, Aristotle talks about how
when it comes to how a government should function, he believes that it should be the
best over the rest. Aristotle prioritizes the greater good of the people rather than the
interests of individuals. He’s using the claim that a democracy can only work if the
government uses a system of merits over a system of blood. This type of claim implies
that some people have to make do without their freedoms because that is better for the
rest of the community. In all actuality, Aristotle is more against democracy than more for
it. He believes that democracy erodes the rule of law and therefore makes it more
dangerous. It gives the higher ups more power than the people actually think they are
providing to them. If Aristotle were to see the state of how the U.S’s government rules
its citizens, I do believe that he would like the way we do things for the most part. No
president can be in office for more than two terms so that no one gains all control over
the country. But I imagine that he would have a problem with some of the policies and
laws that some of the past presidents have tried to imply. It is crucial that we as a
democracy move forward with our country and not backwards. Aristotle’s views on
democracy are for the most part pretty fair and justified. He believes that both the rich
and poor should have equal rights and everyone should respect each other’s
differences.
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Aya Alaqrabawi
Professor Laden
Philosophy 104
September 22, 2021
Level 1 Paper #2
Dear Leyla,
How are you? I hope you are doing well and staying safe! This semester in school I am
taking a Philosophy course that discusses the meaning of democracy. In the recent readings I
have done for this class, there was one that particularly stood out to me. The reading by John
Rawls, Justice as Fairness makes a claim about how in order for a society to flourish and move
forward, basic needs upon those individuals should be met. In his theory, “justice as fairness,” he
defends the conception that self desires should be thrown out the window for an equal and
thriving community. In the reading, Rawls emphasizes this claim by stating that, “one practicable
aim of justice is to provide an acceptable philosophical and moral basis for democratic
institutions and thus to address the question of how the claims of liberty and equality are to be
understood” (Rawls 2). Under this principle, the minority is taken into the consideration of the
greater society. No one is left behind and it is significant for people to understand such principles
for all of us to have an equal opportunity at becoming successful and content citizens. Although
there were many critics having a lot to say about Rawls theory, I do think that many countries
around the world today have adopted some parts of his theory. It is obvious how poverty and
inequality have still managed to make their way into every single community, efforts are made
on a daily basis in an attempt to give aid to those less fortunate. Rawls believed that it is
important to recognize the struggles of the people around us. With this claim, which I agree with,
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people who were born in situations that are less fortunate than others, can be equally treated and
have a chance at a good life.
There are many programs, policies, and laws put in place in almost all governments that
give justice to those who do not have it easy. I have learned of the many nonprofit organizations
that exist in Chicago alone for poverty stricken individuals. There are many ways in which those
people can get the help they need. Rawls’ claim to give people the basic needs that they need
interests me because I am highly fascinated by nonprofit organizations and how they make sure
to give back to their communities in order to have a unified and equal society. His claim makes
me think of one of my favorite nonprofits and that is called, Feed My Starving Children. It is an
organization that I was first introduced to when I went on a field trip in the fifth grade to one of
their locations. We not only packaged the food, but we also got to physically make it. In the
process the volunteers were educating us on where this food will go and just how many children
will be able to have something to eat. Food, along with water, and shelter are all basic needs that
are highly missed in underdeveloped countries. The absence of such basic needs puts an obstacle
in the way of these kids who all they want to do is be children, play, go to school, and not have to
worry about if their family will eat today. Many countries around the world have implemented
Rawls’ theory of justice. Countries like Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, and Norway have
universal healthcare. They recognize that that is a basic need that nobody should have to struggle
to get. Free or affordable education is also a universal law amongst these countries as well.
I believe that in order for a country to thrive, there should be equal opportunities, or at
least as much as possible across the whole spectrum. Leaving people behind when the issue is an
easy fix, is not an excuse. There is a way for the government to budget and make use out of their
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money to get the best out of their citizens. John Rawls’ claim should be implemented more often.
Basic needs are basic human rights, and Rawls understood that. Talk to you soon! Take care.
Best,
Aya
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