Equestrian Imagery in European and American Political Thought: Toward an Understanding of Symbols as Political Texts

Abstract

TjHE Marxist critic Frederic Jameson recently (1981) argued that the interpretive apparatus used study literary texts must be political. In the study of political theory, I propose reverse this formulation by arguing for the priority of literary interpretations of political texts. To say that political theory needs be studied from a more literary perspective is suggest that its language must be confronted metaphorically and symbolically. The literary treatment of political texts returns the study of political theory, political language, and politics itself, their origins and foundations in everyday life and discourse. Fundamentally, it returns them the body and its experiences what Marxists have understood in terms of necessity, Freudians in terms of desire, post-structuralists in terms of power, and cultural anthropologists in terms of ritual and representation.' The body, and the terms by which we seek either live within or outside of it, provide the basic set of symbolic referents for understanding our status as political creatures. In this paper, I argue that symbolic language returns the study of politics its bodily foundations. I aim do so through a detailed examination of equestrian imagery in European and American political thought. My specific focus is on England during the seventeenth century. While the primary concerns of this essay are historical and interpretive, I also address the methodological implications of a literary approach the study of political theory. The consequences of this approach are manifold, not the least of them being its subversive impact upon the analytic and historicist methods that have predominated within the Anglo-American tradition of political theory. The historical significance of equestrian themes relates what Simone de Beauvoir has termed the male desire to assert transcendence over