ABSTRACT

Political Theory on Death and Dying provides a comprehensive, encyclopedic review that compiles and curates the latest scholarship, research, and debates on the political and social implications of death and dying.

Adopting an easy-to-follow chronological and multi-disciplinary approach on 45 canonical figures and thinkers, leading scholars from a diverse range of fields, including political science, philosophy, and English, discuss each thinker’s ethical and philosophical accounts on mortality and death. Each chapter focuses on a single established figure in political philosophy, as well as religious and literary thinkers, covering classical to contemporary thought on death. Through this approach, the chapters are designed to stand alone, allowing the reader to study every entry in isolation and with greater depth, as well as trace how thinkers are influenced by their predecessors.

A key contribution to the field, Political Theory on Death and Dying provides an excellent overview for students and researchers who study philosophy of death, the history of political thought, and political philosophy.

chapter 3|11 pages

“Every Form of Death”

Thucydides on Death's Political Presence

chapter 5|10 pages

Good Old Age

Aristotle and the “Virtues” of Aging

chapter 6|10 pages

The Buddha, Death, and Taxes

chapter 7|10 pages

Flourishing toward Dissolution

Epicurus on the Resilience of Tranquility

chapter 10|10 pages

Life and Death as a Political Act

Cicero and the Stoics

chapter 11|10 pages

Prenatal and Posthumous Nonexistence

Lucretius on the Harmlessness of Death

chapter 12|11 pages

The Road to Freedom

Seneca on Fear, Reason, and Death

chapter 13|9 pages

Continuity Without Corruption

The Political Theology of Death in St. Augustine

chapter 14|10 pages

Jihād for the City

How Alfarabi Discourages, and Encourages, Death in Battle

chapter 15|10 pages

Techniques for the Social Self

Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and the Remembrance of Death

chapter 17|9 pages

The Young, the Old, and the Immortal

Machiavelli on Political Health and Aging

chapter 18|9 pages

Death in Montaigne's Essays

chapter 19|9 pages

When “Every Third Thought Shall Be My Grave”

Shakespeare's King Lear and The Tempest

chapter 22|11 pages

“The Wages of Sin”

Morality and Mortality in John Milton's Paradise Lost

chapter 23|11 pages

A Liberation from Fear

Benedict de Spinoza on Religion, Philosophy, and Mortality

chapter 27|10 pages

Can Philosophy Console Us?

Hume's Understanding of Mortality

chapter 30|11 pages

Nature, Second Nature, and Supernature

Death and Consolation in the Thought of Edmund Burke

chapter 32|11 pages

Overcoming the Mortal Diseases and Short Lives of Republican Governments

Publius and Political Immortality

chapter 33|10 pages

Hegel on Death and the Spirit

chapter 34|10 pages

Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Love

chapter 36|11 pages

“What Is Odious in Death Is not Death Itself, but the Act of Dying”

John Stuart Mill on the Political Philosophy of Death and Dying

chapter 38|11 pages

Facing Death Fearlessly, So Others Can Live Without Fear

Gandhi's Philosophy as Art of Dying

chapter 39|11 pages

“An Earthly Immortality”

Arendt on Mortality, Politics, and Political Death

chapter 41|11 pages

Make Live and Let Die

Michel Foucault, Biopower, and the Art of Dying Well

chapter 43|10 pages

Metamorphoses

Gilles Deleuze on Living and Death