Antigone and Addison’s Cato: Redeeming Exemplarity in Political Thought

Abstract

What does political theory gain from tragedy? Recent work by Bonnie Honig, Patchen Markell, Richard Halpern, and Tracy Strong (to name a few) pushes back against instrumentalist claims for art that reduce literary texts into moral lessons in how to be sympathetic to the experience of people unlike oneself. Honig and the rest appeal to Hannah Arendt’s suggestions in The Human Condition and elsewhere that the spectacularity, ephemerality, and unpredictability of dramatic performance—and the tragic tendency to showcase human finitude—transform the theater into “a space of freedom pursued for its own sake” (Richard Halpern, “Theater and democratic thought: Arendt to Ranciere,” Critical Inquiry 27.3 (2011) 545–7, quotation from 571). Embedded in Honig’s arguments is the notion that tragedy is exemplary, and experienced as such, in that the characters in tragedy stand for a particular class or political values or problems. She sets the reading of critics who see in Antigone “a model of dissident politics” against her own interpretation of Antigone performing “Homeric/elite objections” to Athenian democracy: “the play airs through its two main characters…concerns about the costs of a particular democratic form of life.” In this paper I read Addison’s Cato as a hero who accomplishes an exemplary evasion of his own exemplary history by dodging his own legacy in history and literature.