1. On the devaluation of classical political thought by the behavioral revolution, see Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” American Political Science Review [hereafter cited as APSR] 63, 4 (Dec. 1969). For a dismissal of the moral and political claims of the ancient polis, see Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), as well as Stephen T. Holmes, “Aristippus in and out of Athens,” APSR 73, 1 (Mar. 1979): 113–27. For recent social history, see Orlando Patterson, Freedom, vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of the Western World (New York: Basic Books, 1991). A few feminist examples are Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971); Susan Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (New York: Longman, 1983), and Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). On the construction of Greece by German classicists, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987)

2. A few examples among classicists are Charles Segal, J.-P. Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Simon Goldhill, John J. Winkler, Froma Zeitlin, and Josiah Ober. See also John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), ch. 1, for an account of the influence of post-structuralism on classical scholarship. On the invasion of classics by nonspecialists, see Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben, Josiah Ober, and John Wallach (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), introduction.

3. See Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1986).

4. See Foucault’s essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); and Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), and The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987).

5. See, e.g., Dana Villa, “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” APSR 86, 3 (Sept. 1992): 712–21; Bonnie Honig, “Arendt, Identity and Difference,” Political Theory 16, 1 (Feb. 1988): 77–98; Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy (New York: Verso, 1992), and id., “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott, pp. 369–84 (New York: Routledge, 1992). For feminist criticisms of Arendt, see, e.g., Patricia Springborg, “Hannah Arendt and the Classical Republican Tradition,” in Thinking, Judging, Freedom, ed. G. T. Kaplan and C. S. Kessler (Sydney: G. Allen & Unwin, 1989), pp. 9–17; Wendy L. Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988). On the concept of agonistic feminism, see Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic Feminism,” in Feminists Theorize, pp. 215–35. But see now also her recent book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). Exceptions to this are Hanna Pitkin’s attempt, in “Justice: On Relating Public and Private,” Political Theory 9, 3 (Aug. 1981): 303–26, to rescue Arendt, not via Foucault, Nietzsche, and the politics of agonistic subjectivity, but via an appeal to justice and the Aristotelian category of deliberation, as well as Ann M. Lane and Warren J. Lane’s appropriation of the Aristotelian categories of praxis and phronesis for feminist thought. See their essay “Athenian Political Thought and the Feminist Politics of Poiesis and Praxis,” in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben, Josiah Ober, and John Wallach, pp. 265–88 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). On the concept of “agonistic democracy,” see William Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), x. The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), is another postmodern attempt to theorize the “public sphere” that relies, implicitly and explicitly, on the classical categories of republican virtue, public and private, and the agora (the public as a phantasmagoria, or phantom agora), if mostly by way of critique and in opposition. For a modernist acknowledgement of the Greeks, see Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition and Jürgen Habermas,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 73–98. Also see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 8, 9 (1990), who tends to confuse discursive reason with theatrical space, most notably on p. 57.

6. On such transformations in the power of the state and economy, see, e.g., Sheldon Wolin, “Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism,” Social Research 57, 1 (1990): 5–30, and “Democracy and the Welfare State: Theoretical Connections between Staatsräson and Wohlfahrtstaatsräson,” in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989): 151–79; William Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison: University of Wisconson Press, 1987); Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), and Theory of Communicative Action. On politics as spectacle and the general destabilization of once-settled categories, see Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majority (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), and “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), pp. 1–79, esp. pp. 3, 11–12, and 83, as well as Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (London: Picador, 1986). A more concrete treatment of politics as spectacle is Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). On the reconfiguration of political space and the increasing irrelevance of the democratic, territorial nation-state, see William Connolly, “Tocqueville, Territory and Violence,” Theory, Culture and Society 11, 1 (Winter 1994): 19–41, which fruitfully explores the tension between those elements adumbrated in his title. In a more radical vein, see Paul Virilio’s The Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), who seems to conclude that political space as we know it has been irretrievably lost. From a postcolonial perspective, see Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Robbins, pp. 269–95. On the African diaspora as challenge to Enlightenment cultural hegemony, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail Press, 1993).

7. See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July/Aug. 1984): 53–92, and Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979).

8. On the recovery of plural, counterhegemonic, and subaltern experiences in the construction of “the” Western “public,” recent revisionist historiography is particularly telling: in revolutionary France, the masculine public sphere constituted itself through the exclusion of women’s publicity as republican virtuosity; in England and Germany, “the public” represented itself as a universal category, conveniently concealing the particular class origins of its universality; while in the nineteenth-century United States, competing public spheres and counterpublics comprised of women provided a variety of alternative and competing routes to public life. During Reconstruction, a black counterpublic emerged and was partially successful in gaining access to official discourse and oppositional publics before it dissolved. See Fraser “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); Geoff Eely, “Nations, Publics and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, pp. 289–339 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Anna Yeatman, “Beyond Natural Right: The Conditions for Universal Citizenship,” Social Concept 4, 2 (June 1988): 3–32; and Michael Dawson, “A Black Counterpublic? Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics,” Public Culture 7 (1994): 195–223. On the concept of “governing representations,” see Anne Norton, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

9. The most recent are Richard Peterson, Democratic Philosophy and the Politics of Knowledge (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) and David C. Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994); but see also Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity; David C. Hoy, “Foucault: Modern or Postmodern?” in After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. Jonathan Arac (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Martin Jay, “Habermas and Modernism,” Praxis International 4, 1 (Apr. 1984): 1–14, and the essays collected in Richard Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).

10. The first of these “defenses” of modernity was given as “Modernity: An Incomplete Project” upon Habermas’s receipt of the Adorno Prize in 1980 and subsequently published as “Modernity vs. Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3–14. But see also Jürgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Rereading Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 26 (Spring/Summer 1982): 13–20, republished in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), itself a sustained defense of enlightened modernity. On the debate between French and German intellectuals, see Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism.

11. See Habermas, “Modernity vs. Postmodernity” and also Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 336–67.

12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 1: 159.

13. On this aspect of the argument, see Habermas, “An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject,” in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 315. But see also id., Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, “Intermediate Reflections,” for a detailed specification of the concept of communicative reason.

14. On power as a permanent provocation, see Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Dreyfus and Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 221; on agonism, see id., “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 85. See also id., Power/Knowledge, p. 52, and the essay “Truth and Power,” pp. 109–33.

15. On Habermas’s own criticisms of “totalizing” critique, see Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 336–38, where he conflates Adorno, Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida.

16. On genealogy as a strategy meant to disrupt globalizing discourse, see Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 81–83, and “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Foucault Reader, pp. 76–100.

17. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 362–65.

18. Although Paul Friedländer’s Platon (1928–30) predates Habermas’s concept of power-free speech, Friedländer’s interpretation of Socratic dialogue is remarkably similar to Habermas’s formulation. See Paul Friedländer, Plato, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 2: 154–70.

19. E. R. Dodds explicitly links Callicles and Nietzsche in the appendix to Gorgias:A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), trans. and ed. Dodds, pp. 387–91. On Socrates and resentment, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (1889), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 476, and The Will to Power (1906), trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 519. But compare the Gorgias, 457e and 458a, where Socrates says he is interested in the truth, not in winning an argument. On the incommensurability of political and theoretical language games, a distinction drawn from Aristotle, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 66, and Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, pp. 19–43, 28.

20. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, p. 51.

21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), p. 8.

22. J.-P. Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 32–33.

23. Froma I. Zeitlin, “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” in Nothing To Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John A. Winkler and Zeitlin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 130–67.

24. This is an appropriate time to acknowledge my tremendous debt to those classicists who have most shaped my understanding of Greek tragedy and political thought. The works of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, of Charles Segal, Froma Zeitlin, Martha Nussbaum, Simon Goldhill, and Josiah Ober have all been formative for me. I am not a classicist myself, and I could not have trespassed on such foreign terrain without their help. Such trespasses run the obvious risks of any amateur who steps outside the comfortable confines of his own discipline (in my case, academic political theory), and no doubt errors of a philological kind are scattered throughout this book. I can only hope that I minimally disappoint Gary Miles and John Lynch, who patiently taught me Attic Greek during my stay at Santa Cruz.

25. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum Books, 1969). For specific discussions of Nietzsche’s influence on Horkheimer and Adorno, see George Friedman, The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981); David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Nancy S. Love, “Epistemology and Exchange: Marx, Nietzsche and Critical Theory,” New German Critique 41 (Spring/ Summer 1987): 71–94, and Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); James Miller, “Some Implications of Nietzsche’s Thought for Marxism,” Telos 37 (Fall 1978): 22–41; Peter Pütz, “Nietzsche and Critical Theory,” Telos 50 (Winter 1981–82): 103–14; Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). For a negative assessment of Nietzsche’s influence, see Habermas, “Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment.” All this attention to the Nietzsche connection should not obscure the affinities between Adorno and Walter Benjamin, whose Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (trans. John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic Drama [London: NLB, 1977]) had a profound and lasting effect on Adorno’s work. In fact, much of Adorno’s “tragic” sensibility comes from Benjamin. See Susan Buck-Morss’s The Origins of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), still one of the best books on Adorno’s version of critical theory. For the most recent scholarship on Nietzsche’s specific influence on Dialectic of Enlightenment, see Douglas Kellner’s “Critical Theory Today: Revisiting the Classics,” Theory, Culture and Society 10, 2: 43–60.

26. Despite its suggestive title, Paul Connerton’s The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), makes no systematic effort to connect Greek tragedy with critical theory. In “The Theatre of the ‘Other’: Adorno, Poststructuralism and the Critique of Identity,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 17, 3 (1991): 243–63, Samir Gandesha characterizes Adorno’s thought (including his collaborative work with Horkheimer) as a “retrieval of the structure of tragedy” and focuses on the category of remembered suffering.

27. Charles P. Segal, “Greek Tragedy and Society: A Structuralist Perspective,” in Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 23.

28. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ix

29. For Nietzsche, the point in studying the thought of the classical past was its ability to act “counter to our time and thereby..on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874), in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983], p. 60).