4 - Attitudes toward History: the agon of history

Summary

… peace is something we must fight for…

Burke, GM

The so-called “I” is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting “corporate we's.”

Burke, “Dictionary of Pivotal Terms”

In later commentary on PC, Burke twice disavows its history – magic, religion, science – first in the second edition (lix) and again in the third (307). He also implicitly disavows it in ATH, only two years after PC, as he offers a new historical narrative, one that is much longer, constituting the second of the book's three parts, and altogether different in conception and theoretical importance.

Burke remarks retrospectively “that P&C is to ATH as Plato's Republic is to his Laws. That is, just as the Republic deals with an ideal state, and the Laws deals with a real one, so P&C thinks of communication in terms of ideal cooperation, whereas ATH would characterize tactics and patterns of conflict typical of actual human associations” (CS 216). This characterization is accurate as far as it goes, though it can mislead: ATH is not an application of an ideal to reality but a theoretical reorientation in which the tension between PC's constructionist and essentialist sides is resolved in favor of the constructionist.

In the historical narratives in both PC and ATH there is an agonistic process in which cultural orthodoxies displace one another. But PC's narrative is simple and abstract because it conceives this process as a projection of motivations rooted in a biological subject of history.