Towards a genealogy of sacrificial rhetoric: The discursive construction of authority in Luther, Hegel, and Weber (Martin Luther, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Max Weber, Germany)

This dissertation addresses the historical role played by "sacrifice" in shaping conceptions of the self, society and history. It traces a genealogy of "sacrificial rhetoric" that begins with the Christian reconfiguration of the pagan ritual both doctrinally (through the Crucifixion and Eucharist) and practically (through ascetic substitutions like chastity, poverty, and obedience). In contrast to sacrifice in ancient and indigenous cultures, where the destruction of life or wealth ritually enacts a hierarchy of values (the lower is sacrificed to the higher, the gift to the source, the creature to the creator), Christian "sacrifice" became less a matter of ritual than of discourse. To develop the heuristic resources of "sacrificial rhetoric" as a comparative, critical concept, an introductory chapter situates this rhetorical analysis in relation to the treatment of sacrifice in social scientific discourses. This chapter also relates sacrifice to gift, theft, and exchange, elaborates seven "axes of variation" to compare sacrificial variations across cultures and through history, and isolates two primary discursive effects of sacrificial rhetoric, disaggregation and consecration. Individual chapters examine how the pivotal German writers Luther, Hegel, and Weber continue the Christian process of sacrificial transformation as they strategically deployed the term to demarcate both between sacred and profane and between self and other. At critical junctures "sacrificial rhetoric" allowed each of these writers to break with modes of subjectivity defined by the ancient allegiance to the polis, or the medieval bonds of fealty, in favor of a subject of the modern nation-state defined in relation to worship, reflection, and labor.