Dancing in Chains · Default Product

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Philosophy is often depicted as generically distinct from literature, myth, and history, as a discipline that eschews narration and relies exclusively on abstract reason. This book takes issue with that assumption, arguing instead that political philosophers have commonly presented their readers with a narrative, rather than a logic, of politics. The book maintains that philosophical texts frequently persuade through the creation of a role that they invite their audience to inhabit. Political theory is most powerful not when it erects timeless principles, but when it alters readers' understanding of their own past and future. By this the author means that a theorist's account of history or of time itself is in many instances the center of (and not merely an addendum to) an account of human nature and politics; political theory seeks not so much to reform our morals as to reshape our memories. This book investigates the place of narrative in politics in two ways. It offers a hypothesis of a broad connection between political identity and narrative, and it analyzes three major figures in the history of political thought—Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche—to demonstrate that their work is be

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