On Inauguration Day, Barack Obama stood in front of nearly two million “fellow citizens” and declared to America, “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”

Stirring words, but Derek Barker wants us to be wary of such progressive sentiments, and he has written a very interesting book in defense of reviving an older, tragic sense of democratic citizenship that accepts the persistence of conflict but nevertheless is committed to “public deliberation as an ongoing and perpetually incomplete process” (p. 148).

Barker tells “the story of the shift from active and engaged participation rooted in a sense of tragedy to the displacement of citizenship through a sense of reconciliation” (p. 1). The tragic antagonist of Barker's story is Hegel, who has given modern liberal democracy a “citizenless politics” (p. 3), in which institutions are not “dependent on and driven by citizen participation” (p. 2). Barker argues in Chapter 3 that “Hegelian liberalism” is rooted in Hegel's idea (seen in his famous reading of Antigone) that “tragic conflict is self-dissolving and reconciliation is immanent in the underlying structure of conflict and reconciliation in the developmental logic of the institutions of the state” (p. 2). In “Hegelian liberalism,” political institutions replace citizens as the locus of “ethical life” (p. 67), which “undermines the moral psychology of active citizenship by emphasizing reconciliation at the expense of a sense of tragedy” (p. 83). As a result, contemporary liberalism believes that “institutional politics can be supported by approaches to citizenship that emphasize passive obedience to the state or apathy toward the political realm” (p. 2).

Barker uses the first two chapters to lay out the ancient Greek understanding of “active citizenship” that we have lost. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the contributions made to this outlook by Sophocles' Antigone (Chapter 1) and Aristotle's political philosophy (Chapter 2). If Hegel is the story's antagonist, Sophocles' Haemon is the protagonist, an example of someone who develops “practical wisdom” (p. 41) through “sympathetic identification, listening, and speaking” (p. 40). Specifically, Haemon learns what neither Creon nor Antigone does: that a healthy civic life of “ruling and being ruled” (p. 45) can occur only through “deliberation in the broadest sense” (bouleusis) (p. 48), which “is sensitive to tragedy, tolerant of conflict, and appropriate to active citizenship” (p. 41).

After discussing the ancients and Hegel's turn away from tragedy, Barker devotes Chapters 4–6 to the failure of contemporary political theory to revive the tragic sense necessary for active citizenship. In his chapters on Francis Fukuyama and Richard Rorty (Chapter 4), John Rawls (Chapter 5), and Judith Butler (Chapter 6), Barker argues quite powerfully that even “contemporary postmodern” thinkers (p. 140) share the Hegelian attitude that “conflict is self-dissolving and capable of final reconciliation” and therefore that “the goal of politics” should be “the elimination of conflict” (p. 5). Rorty, Butler, and the later Rawls are aware of “the post-Nietzchean and post-metaphysical condition of the contemporary world” (p. 139), and thus they know that liberalism and democracy cannot morally fiat away conflict based on race, class, gender, or religion. Yet despite their apparent embrace of the persistence of conflict, Barker contends with some success that such thinkers are nevertheless in thrall to the idea that “conflict is a temporary stage in a larger process of reconciliation” (p. 139). As a result, their “reconciliatory postmodernism” still wrongly—and without any real reason—looks forward to the day of final overcoming (p. 141).

Both for its interesting overall argument and its careful treatment of serious thinkers, this is a book worthy of attention by scholars of political thought concerned with healthy democratic politics. Yet for a book wise enough to see that that “conflict is a central and enduring problem of the human condition” (p. 139), the work would do well to consider more fully the causes of political conflict, specifically the relationship between conflict and justice.

According to Barker, injustice is caused by conflict over “[d]ifferences in opinions, experiences, identities, power, and interests” (p. 3), at least where there is a “failure to listen to others” (p. 9). But as understood by early modern thinkers like Hobbes and Locke (who knew something about conflict), the most atrocious political conflicts of “ethnic rivalry, class conflict, religious strife, and war” occur not because people fail to talk and listen to each other (p. 1), but because they hate what the other is saying: They have irreconcilable understandings of political justice (i.e., of the foundation and purpose of government). As Hobbes says in his scathing attack on “Aristotles Civill Philosophy” (Leviathan, Chapter 46), unless there is agreement on an end for political society that all people value and accept (or are forced to accept), encouraging people “to strive for practical wisdom … through serious deliberation with others” (p. 142) is just as likely to lead to the “atrocities that have plagued illiberal societies” (p. 11).

Nor does having an Aristotelian sense of tragedy solve the problem, since, as Barker notes, Aristotle says that we feel tragic pity only “at an apparent evil … which befalls one who does not deserve it” (p. 49, emphasis added). Pity does not produce a shared sense of justice; it presupposes it (p. 51). When people thought that government should defend true religion, Protestants did not have pity for Catholics, for they thought that Catholics deserved harassment, imprisonment, or death. When politics is about tribal ascendancy, Hutus pitilessly massacre Tutsis.

The problem is that democratic participation (even if informed by a tragic sense) does not create a sense of civic fellowship; it depends on it. And what gives citizens a sense of having something fundamental in common (President Obama's “unity of purpose”)? Barker concludes that it is “human mortality,” which is the great theme of tragedy (p. 145). But as Rousseau observed, the ancient response to mortality was the city's religion, not tragedy (in fact, the tragedies were part of religious festivals [p. 12]). In the modern world, our response is liberalism—i.e., protecting life and property through “representative democracy” (p. 10). In other words, it may be that even the prospect of death is not enough to safely ground “active citizenship” without either illiberal religion or the liberal political ideas and institutions that Barker claims undermine such citizenship.

Talk about tragic.