The problem of how to found a political regime is one of the oldest and most vexed in the history of Western thought. The founding act has often been drenched in blood because certain forms of violence actually help to foster political foundation. This is the illiberal starting point of Jesse Goldhammer's study of the French discourse on sacrificial violence, a theme that he rightly describes as “anathema to mainstream political theory” (p. x), which tends to divert its glance from what it sees as unseemly anachronisms like this. Undaunted, Goldhammer bravely plunges in, turning to 1790s France and the theorizing about sacrifice that it spawned for insight into the violence that he claims is “necessary for political beginnings” (p. 1). While the French revolutionaries engaged in “sacrificial practices and interpretations” such as the beheading of Louis XVI, they never actually developed a theory of sacrifice. That was the contribution of notorious postrevolutionary writers, such as Joseph de Maistre, Georges Sorel, and Georges Bataille, who well understood that violent sacrifice “facilitates the process of conferring moral legitimacy to political power and setting boundaries for political identity” (p. 192).

Sacrifice is a form of violence with a useful capacity for setting things apart from the ordinary and profane, thereby endowing them with a sense of the sacred. Goldhammer argues that because humans “are more inclined to act morally or to obey when the origin of the law or religious command is hallowed” (p. 4), sacrificial violence has been employed throughout history by the politically astute to render secular laws legitimate. Realizing this, the revolutionaries appropriated two traditions of sacrifice—from ancient Rome and early Christianity—when violently founding and legitimizing a new republican regime in France. By gathering French people together “as witnesses to violent, sublime spectacles” (p. 47), such as the ritual beheading of the king, the nation was to be cleansed and purified and sovereignty symbolically transferred from him to the people.

Goldhammer argues that the reactionary Catholic writer Joseph de Maistre was the first French intellectual to offer a comprehensive theory of sacrifice, a fact that we are told no fewer than five times, which is typical of the author's occasional tendency towards repetition. Maistre believed that the revolutionaries unleashed a fury of divinely inspired destruction that both punished France for its sins and morally purified a decadent nation. The Terror was therefore salutary because it restored the social and political equilibrium upset by the regicide. For Maistre, such violence, while morally restorative, is powerless to create anything new, contrary to the beliefs of the revolutionaries. The anarchist Georges Sorel shared Maistre's belief in the moral utility of violent sacrifice. He also agreed with Maistre that violence is incapable of founding states. However, some forms of proletarian bloodshed can facilitate moral reformation and inspire revolutionary action by stirring the emotions. Sorel believed that this was urgently needed to save the working classes of France from bourgeois decadence. Unlike most of his socialist contemporaries, he was revolted by the state violence initiated by the Jacobins, which the authoritarian Maistre grudgingly admired. Instead, he believed that the inspirational example of a small number of martyred workers modeling themselves on early “primitive Christianity” would greatly amplify the impact of proletarian violence, thereby “preventing the need for widespread incidences of bloodshed” (p. 116).

According to the “excremental philosopher” Georges Bataille, violent sacrifice is not only incapable of founding new political regimes but cannot even promote moral regeneration, as Maistre and Sorel believed that it could. The French revolutionary sacrifice of the king led to a “permanent destabilisation of political power” (p. 156) that rendered all subsequent politics “impossible.” The very “uselessness” of such violence is its greatest virtue for Bataille, since he believed that bloodshed can foster the formation of an “acephalic” (headless), self-subverting “community” bound together by “the shared experience of unrecoverable violent loss” (p. 163). So Bataille embraced a form of “unproductive violence” that would give birth to “a metapolitical community paradoxically defined by its permanent lack of foundation” (p. 11).

Goldhammer's book is refreshingly unorthodox in its subject matter and admirably clear in the exposition of its themes and ideas, with mercifully little academic jargon. It introduces the reader to a disturbing and fascinating subject that few political theorists pay any heed to these days. It is essentially a work of intellectual history whose aim is expository rather than argumentative. This is made clear at the outset, where the author states that he will address three questions, all of which are historical: “Why did the French revolutionaries recuperate ancient concepts of sacrificial violence? How did this recuperation inaugurate a modern theoretical debate about the role of sacrifice in founding politics? Finally, how do Maistre, Sorel and Bataille, writing in reaction to the violent, sacrificial founding of the French Republic, reconceptualize the relationship between sacrificial bloodshed and political instauration?” (p. 2).

The weakest parts of the book (of which there are few) come when Goldhammer switches from exposition to argument. For example, he criticizes the French revolutionaries, Maistre, Sorel, and the postwar Bataille for believing that certain forms of violence are morally regenerative and politically useful. Yet he nowhere explains in any depth why he thinks this belief is wrong. It amounts to a mere counterassertion. Also, in his conclusion, he claims that violent sacrifice “remains part of the modern political condition” because political authority “requires an element of sacredness” and, in the absence of gods, “modern political actors must find alternative sources of the sacred,” which they often find in bloody sacrifice. Yet not until two pages from the end of his book does Goldhammer actually take up the question of how this discourse on violence might apply in contemporary circumstances, and his answer is very sketchy and superficial. As a work of intellectual history, The Headless Republic is both highly engaging and an important contribution to a neglected subject in the history of ideas. The author's occasional surrender to the temptation to go beyond this only detracts from his accomplishment.

This book suffers from three relatively minor defects. First, we are told in passing that Sorel read Maistre. But we are not told what he read or what impact (if any) it had on him. Nor are we told if Bataille read either Maistre or Sorel and, if he did, how they influenced his views on violence. While these are not crucial questions, they are important and interesting, and their absence is disappointing. Secondly, Goldhammer describes the works of Maistre, Sorel, and Bataille as forming “a distinctive, modern tradition of thought” (p. 2) on the theme of sacrificial violence. It is not clear whether three thinkers can constitute a tradition and why the Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault are not included in this tradition (very little is said about either), given their interest in violence. Finally, Goldhammer states that “Maistre came to reject every conceivable facet of the Revolution” (p. 71). Yet elsewhere he rightly asserts that Maistre interpreted the violence of the revolution in providential terms, as a divinely inspired corrective to the decadence and hubris of eighteenth-century France. Maistre was therefore far from rejecting “every conceivable facet” of an event that he saw as ultimately guided by the hand of God. Defects aside, this work is an insightful exploration of the significance and power of sacrificial violence in modern politics.