Virtue's Self-Sacrifice

Sacrifice is part of virtue: if corruption is submission to temptation, its opposite is self-denial. Revolutionary leaders wanted to be seen to practice this trait; in the early years, the Revolutionary movement thrived on sacrificing British vices like tea and fine clothes; soldiers and officers after the war held that they had made great sacrifices for an insufficiently grateful people. In Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic, he presents the Constitution as an ironic finale to this Revolution based on virtue, for contrary to the aims of its designers, it provided for a system that rejected the idea of virtue in favour of libertarian freedom and interest politics.

But if we, alternatively, pay attention to the sacrificial aspect of virtue - perhaps its Christian rather than its classical face - we can also interpret the 'end of classical politics' as no less paradoxical, but more deliberate: the framers offering their virtue to create a system that would not rely on virtue in the future.

Man's domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken... This immense though superfluous sacrifice is required - against sacrifice itself. Odysseus, too, is the self who always restrains himself and forgets his life, who saves his life and yet recalls it only as wandering. He also is a sacrifice for the abrogation of sacrifice. His dominative renunciation, which gains mastery over itself not in order to coerce itself and others, but in expiation. [Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp.54-6]