Sacrifice is a difficult theme to think through. On one hand, it usually involves violence, and is thus morally problematic. On the other hand, something new and presumably good comes into being through this violence. The problem is all the more daunting when it comes to the role of sacrificial violence in the foundation of political communities, where the death of some is taken to generate the society of others. Sacrifice is central here because the new political authority is endowed with sacredness through its violence. But how does sacrificial violence constitute legitimate power? And not least, must the foundation of political communities be drenched in blood?

Those are the broad questions that occupy Jesse Goldhammer in this thought-provoking and elegant book. Those are also some of the big questions that occupied the three French authors whose work stands at the center of this book: Joseph de Maistre, Georges Sorel, and Georges Bataille. Goldhammer argues that the French Revolution gave rise to a unique discourse on sacrificial violence among French intellectuals, and his book explores this "important and heretofore unrecognized theoretical debate [about sacrificial violence] among a diverse group of French counter-Enlightenment intellectuals". [p. 2]

The first chapter of the book focuses on the French Revolution. Goldhammer identifies two distinct traditions of sacrificial thought that informed revolutionary practices: the Roman-Republican tradition, which centered on the figure of Junius Brutus who executed his own children in order to save the republic, and the Christian tradition, which centered on the figure of Christ. Goldhammer offers the valuable insight that whereas Christ's death generated divine authority, Brutus's sacrifice "depletes divine authority of its sacred power, replacing it with popular sovereignty." [p. 36] With the intellectual roots of this sacrificial logic of sacred exchange in place, the rest of the chapter moves rather swiftly through a series of revolutionary moments, which according to Goldhammer all constitute cases of sacrificial violence. Scholars of the French Revolution might have reservations about grouping together such distinct moments as the insurrection of August 10, the September Massacres, the entire Terror, and the reaction against the Jacobins on 9 Thermidor under the label of sacrifice, but Goldhammer's succeeds in showing that there were enough contemporaries of the French Revolution-Robespierre chief among them-who saw things in this way.

Against the background of revolutionary violence, Goldhammer moves to analyze the work of each thinker in three consecutive chapters. The second chapter deals with the early nineteenth-century royalist philosopher Joseph de Maistre. Maistre was a devout Catholic who saw the Terror as divine punishment for the evils of the Revolution, especially for the execution of the king. Goldhammer analyzes this view as a double-edged sword. On one hand, Maistre saw revolutionary violence as inherently evil. On the other hand, Maistre did attribute regenerative capacities to this violence because, based on the crucifixion, he saw it as redemption of the guilty through the spilt blood of the innocent. In Goldhammer's ironic reading then, Maistre's efforts to produce a conservative view of regeneration ended up providing, willy-nilly, a "theoretical justification for the revolutionary practices he despises." [p. 72]

Goldhammer directs a similar critique at the anarcho-syndicalist thinker Georges Sorel, whose Reflexions sur la violence appeared in 1905. Sorel objected to the Terror as an authoritarian state apparatus turned against the people, but he also realized that some form of violence was a necessary part of class struggle. Sorel's challenge then was to locate a form of violence that would support, rather than subvert the causes of the proletariat. Inspired by, of all cases, the early Christian martyrs, Sorel posited an ideal of limited violence in the form of the worker's martyrdom, the self-sacrifice of the few, which, as "sublime bloodshed might regenerate morality, but without the terror anticipated by the French Revolutionaries and Maistre." [p. 119] The enigmatic Reflexions sur la violence led scholars, most notably Sir Isaiah Berlin, to identify Sorel as one of the Godfathers of twentieth century fascism, and one of the merits of Goldhammer's chapter here is that Sorel's thought belonged just as much to the Marxist tradition.

In contrast to Maistre and Sorel, Georges Bataille, whose work is the subject of the fourth chapter, refused to ascribe any creative capacity to sacrifice. For Bataille, sacrifice does not begin anything. Rather, it ends and ruptures, leaving absolute loss in its wake. Is there any possibility for a political community after such a rupture without recompense? There is, answers Bataille, but a community built around loss, left in a "violent and ecstatic state of permanent alternation between purity and impurity". [p. 160] Yet for Goldhammer even Bataille fails to completely detach himself from the regenerative potentials of sacrifice. Significantly, this moment comes after World War II, when Bataille predicated the success of the Marshall Plan on economic sacrifices by the United States. Bataille wanted the Unites States to provide resources in order to raise the global standard of living, to give deliberately and without return, thus subverting the very foundations of the logic of exchange of bourgeois society. Still, by embracing such a radically negative conception of community-as Goldhammer succinctly put it, "a community of ecstatic loss" [p. 182]-Bataille came closest to subverting the logic of the discourse on sacrificial violence.

Though each of the authors mentioned above thought about sacrificial violence in very different ways, the book's conclusion finds surprising unity in their discord. Goldhammer argues that, ultimately, each of the intellectuals he discusses "places a version of sacrificial violence in the service of modern political change and redemption… In this way, they tragically and ironically repeat in the realm of theory the same error unintentionally committed by the French Revolutionaries when they attempted to save the Republic through Terror." [p. 195]. What emerges from Goldhammer's analysis then is that attributing a politically foundational role to sacrificial violence is a slippery slope, which tends to send those who embark upon it hurling towards disaster. Goldhammer's success in showing conceptual affinities between authors as radically different from each other as Maistre, Sorel and Bataille, is one important achievement of this book.

As convincing as Goldhammer's conclusion is, it is also important to note that it deals with somewhat unusual cases. The three authors under consideration are after all highly idiosyncratic. Many other French theorists, from the same period and with similar theoretical and political concerns might not have accorded such a prominent role to sacrificial violence in the foundation of the republic. This is not to suggest that Maistre, Sorel and Bataille's work on violence is not worth of serious consideration-Goldhammer's book demonstrates the significance of their work. Rather, it is to suggest that scholars of France might have reservations about the tendency to identify the history of Modern France with violent convulsions, an all too prevalent myth in French history.

On another level, the thesis of the book might have benefited from a discussion of alternative stories about political foundations, ones in which sacrificial violence figures less or not at all. Goldhammer's juxtaposition of the discourse on sacrificial violence with liberalism, "which holds that violence plays no role in the creation of legitimate political communities" is insufficient in this respect. [p. 197] The fact that liberalism does not see violence as necessary to political foundations does not mean that liberal regimes were not founded through and in violence-it might mean that liberal theories are better at forgetting.

But these quandaries aside, Goldhammer's book constitutes an important contribution to the study of political foundations. In the specific case of France, the book joins a recent and curious series of publications on the subject of sacrifice, notably Ivan Strenski's Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought in France (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Richard D. E. Burton's Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2001). Goldhammer's book differs significantly by focusing on the ways in which three seminal thinkers in Modern France used the violent experiences of the French Revolution to rethink the problem of political foundation. The book would thus be of interest first and foremost to political theorists and intellectual historians. But the book deserves a broader readership because of the provoking and timely thoughts it offers on the place of violence in the crucible between politics and religion, and the clarity with which Goldhammer exposes the complex thought of the authors he discusses is sure to make this possible.

Ronen Steinberg, University of Chicago

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