The citizen as believer: Religion and politics in the constitution of the modern self (Friedrich Nietzsche, John Calvin)

This dissertation explores the concept of the self and its relationship to civic and religious commitments in the thought of four prominent Western political thinkers. I do not intend to join the debate as to the ontological, analytical and philosophical status of the self in contemporary political theory, nor to ask what a self is for modern Western citizens, or how we can conceive of it in contemporary political thought, and what implications different conceptions have for 20th century politics.; The central question guiding my exegesis concerns how religious allegiances and civic commitments have contributed to configure and re-configure the apparatus which is the self. I explore what sets of dynamic relationships between religious faith and civic commitment have been explicitly or implicitly theorized as being relevant to the constitution of the self by authors such as Augustine of Hippo, Niccolo Machiavelli, John Calvin and Friedrich Nietzsche. In order to clarify the direction and purpose of my argument, I address three issues in my introduction: first, what I mean by the word self; second, how I approach the study of this concept in the writings of four authors belonging to radically different historical periods; and, third, how the choice of these authors is justified in the context of the broader array of thinkers and texts in political theory.; I then proceed to treat each thinker in a separate chapter, while providing connections among their texts as they emerge. I hope to show that each of these thinkers contributes to a process of crystallization of the self from a fluid, dynamic entity into a more structured subject. The process by which this is accomplished involves a multifarious constellation of moral, political and religious concepts, from sin to liberty, from power to predestination. Eventually, I argue, Nietzsche begins to dismantle the edifice of the subject by exposing the psychological dynamics that constitute it, namely the genealogy of ressentiment, priestly morality, and the herd-like quality of modern politics. The conclusion suggests some possible routes to reconstruct a democratic politics of active engagement which does not require the subjectification of citizens.