Experimental Critical Theory (ECT) Seminar: “The Role of the Renaissance in the Transformation of the Western Political Imaginary: Petrarch’s Africa and Death for the ‘Fatherland’”
Etienne Anheim (History, EHESS, Paris) The ideal of “death for the fatherland” (Pro patria mori) may seem to be an invariable reality of the human society, from Sparta and Athens to today’s wars. In fact, it is a political imaginary whose periodization can be traced. Ernst Kantorowicz, in a famous article published in 1951, proposed...