Our idea of political and military glory is incongruous. On the one hand, its legitimacy and even its coherence have been called into question by the rise of mechanized and unmanned warfare, and by the ubiquity of asymmetrical fighting. Wilfred Owen’s complaint that it’s grotesque to lionize the glory of patriotic death after the industrial slaughter in the battlefields of the Great WarFootnote ¹ has become something of a cliché about modern fighting. On the other hand, military glory is not going anywhere: From Marine Corps recruitment videos to the throngs mourning Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, from ISIS war poems extolling the restoration of the Caliphate to alt-right talking points offering praise and great renown to those who would keep America white and Christian, the rhetoric of military glory is still as central to organized violence as it was for Homer in the eighth century bce. How are we to make sense of this tension? Before we make headway on that question we need to understand more clearly what we mean when we speak about glory. This chapter will offer an overview of thinking about glory, and this history will, in turn, supply resources for the theory of glory offered in the next chapter. Only with the theory in place can we understand the modern ambivalence about martial glory. What follows is not a comprehensive intellectual history. I’m not an expert on the work of the thinkers discussed in this chapter. I offer, instead, a philosophical mining expedition aimed at extracting the raw materials needed for a historically informed theory of martial glory. As this chapter will make clear, with some exceptions, it has been centuries since philosophers have taken glory seriously. Given that the term is very much present in political discourse and practice, that is a troubling lacuna.

The idea of military glory is as old as war (or at least as old as writing about war): Glory or kleos figures prominently as a theme in Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War – the two key ancient Greek texts about war.Footnote ² Cultural and literary references to glory abound in other great works – from Shakespeare’s rendering of King Henry’s speech before the Battle of Agincourt (“And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here”Footnote ³) to Victor Frankenstein’s admonition of Captain Walton’s mutinous crew (“Did you not call this a glorious expedition? And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror"Footnote ⁴). But while the term shows up repeatedly in literary and historical accounts of war and high adventure, it has had a more checkered life in political philosophy. Glory figures prominently for the Romans (particularly for Cicero) and in the thought of early modern political philosophers (mainly Machiavelli and Hobbes), but with the exception of Hannah Arendt (who addresses the idea somewhat indirectly), there has been little recent conceptual work on the subject.Footnote ⁵ Let’s take a closer look.

1.1 Homeric Glory

The natural starting point for any historical account of glory in the Western tradition is Homer’s Iliad. The narrative contours of the epic are familiar: Achilles is part of the coalition that travels to Troy under King Agamemnon. The expedition is occasioned by the abduction of Helen – the King’s sister-in-law. Like most of the Achaeans, Achilles does not believe in or care about the justness of the coalition’s cause, nor does he believe in the competence of its leaders. He fights not for king or country but because he was made to fight and die a glorious death. Indeed, when Agamemnon takes possession of Achilles’ war captive, Briseis, Achilles complains to his goddess mother, Thetis, that he is being denied the opportunity to achieve the glory and honor that are the very premise of his existence: “Since, my mother, you bore me to be a man with a short life, therefore Zeus of the loud thunder on Olympus should grant me honor at least.”Footnote ⁶ War for Achilles is not judged by its justice or necessity; for him, it is not, in a phrase Clausewitz would make famous later, an instrument of policy. Rather, it is “where men seek glory”Footnote ⁷: an opportunity to display excellence and achieve renown.

There is no celebration of war in the Iliad. If anything, the heartbreaking vignettes it contains about the lives of the Greeks and Trojans who were killed in combat prefigure the “pity of war” themes in World War I poetry.Footnote ⁸ There is no elevation of a grand cause worth dying for. The war that the Achaeans fight is not a good war. And yet Achilles floats above all of this. When he fights, he is in his element, someone doing what he was meant to do – to be excellent at violence. On this account, war is a testing ground, a place for “proving one’s mettle.” Skill, danger, and courage are all required for passing that test. The kind of glory at work here is mostly amoral. What is at issue is the ability to perform well – exceptionally well – under conditions that would undo most. The ability to do with élan what most are afraid to do at all. As Dr. Johnson points out, “the profession of soldiers and sailors has the dignity of danger. Mankind reverence those who have got over fear, which is so general a weakness.”Footnote ⁹ Of course, Achilles is ambivalent about the value of martial glory. Homer portrays him as keenly aware of the alternative to dying young – namely returning home and living out his life peacefully. Indeed, when Odysseus finds Achilles in Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey, the warrior’s ghost dismisses his glorious death, remarking ruefully, “by god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man – some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive – than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”Footnote ¹⁰

Achilles’ counterpart in the Iliad, the Trojan prince Hector, is also not invested in the cause of the war. As far as he’s concerned, his brother, Paris, recklessly entangled the city in an unnecessary fight. And yet Hector cannot but fight. The silliness of the cause does not grant him a reprieve. The glory is in fighting well, in leading the Trojan soldiers (as his position demands), and, more than anything, in avoiding shame or any perception of cowardice. Like Achilles, Hector is keenly aware of the potential costs of the war. In one of the epic’s most moving exchanges, Hector’s wife, Andromache, begs him to wait, to fight defensively. She has nobody left in the world but him: “You, Hector – you are my father now, my noble mother, a brother too, and you are my husband, young and warm and strong.”Footnote ¹¹ Hector knows that if the Trojans lose, the war would claim the lives of his parents and siblings. And even that, he tells his wife, would be “nothing, nothing beside your agony.”Footnote ¹² He knows she might be whisked off to the land of Argos, “laboring at a loom, at another woman’s beck and call.”Footnote ¹³ And yet fight he must, for he would “die of shame”Footnote ¹⁴ if he avoids battle. His role is “to stand up bravely always to fight in the front ranks of the Trojan soldiers, winning my father great glory, glory to myself.”Footnote ¹⁵ For Hector the thirst for glory mixes with a keen sense of duty and a fear of acting shamefully. The proportions between the elements of this mixture are probably a bit different for each of the two heroes. Achilles is motivated more by personal glory, Hector perhaps more by a sense of duty; we shall have more to say later about the relationship between the duty to fight and the bestowal of glory. But, strikingly, in both cases and throughout the Iliad, martial glory is completely disconnected from the reasons for going to war in the first place.

1.2 Thucydides on Glory

If Achilles’ idea of glory is fundamentally apolitical, focused on the recognition of great skill, Thucydides offers us a diametrically opposed view. Consider Pericles’ famous funeral oration, made a year or so into the Peloponnesian War. The beginning of the oration is awkward. Pericles complains that he is uncomfortable giving a speech to commemorate Athens’ fallen soldiers because such an address makes the reputation of many turn on the rhetorical skill of one (himself). The relatives of the dead are bound to be disappointed by any speech (as no praise can satisfy them), while those who did not know the soldiers will suspect hyperbole. After this uncomfortable introduction, Pericles goes on to deliver what has become the most celebrated eulogy in history.

The address begins with a glowing description of Athens – its democratic institutions, the leisure and high standard of living it affords, and the tolerance and respect for individual pursuits – all of which make for a unique way of life worth fighting and dying for. Athens is glorious because its institutions and its citizens’ way of life are glorious. And those who die to defend these institutions and this way of life thus deserve and receive glory. Their glory, according to Pericles, consists in an erasure of their past misdeeds, elevating their lives from the mix of achievement, mediocrity, and foul behavior that marks our own. Dying for a cause as noble as Athens lifts the dead out of drab ordinariness; it erases their personal imperfections and makes their names live on forever: “[E]ven those who were inferior in other ways deserve to have their faults overshadowed by their courageous deaths in war for the sake of their country.”Footnote ¹⁶ With his sacrifice, “each man won praise for himself that will never grow old.”Footnote ¹⁷ Those who have died for a noble cause go down in history, Pericles says, and are remembered not only during the lifetime of those whom they helped or in the places they fought for, but always and anywhere – “for to famous men all the earth is a monument.”Footnote ¹⁸

Glory for Pericles, then, is the robust recognition and honor that come from the willingness to sacrifice for a great cause. In its purest form, it is bestowed on the dead whose faults it erases and whose reputation it makes everlasting. Pericles notes that the dead receive this full-blooded version of glory because people have an easier time honoring those who are no longer in their way: “[Our] good will towards the dead is free of rivalry.”Footnote ¹⁹ Those who were willing to sacrifice their lives for a great cause but survived will likely receive a significant degree of glory but it will, in the nature of things, be somewhat diminished: “[E]ven extreme virtue will scarcely win you a reputation equal to [that of the dead].”Footnote ²⁰ There is, then, according to this view, an interesting relationship between glory and dying. First, the willingness to die for a great cause is part of what one is glorified for. Second, the act of actually dying for the cause facilitates the bestowal of glory by the living: Since those who are left behind are the ones who ultimately award glory, it is easier for them to lavish praise on those who no longer compete with them. Finally, this account tells us that getting oneself killed for an important political project is a useful tool for reputation management. A glorious death revamps one’s social standing in a way that does not quite apply to those who stay alive, subject, as they are, to the ravages of time and their own future behavior.

It’s interesting to note that Pericles’ military strategy early in the war with Sparta – calling on his compatriots to abandon their farms, crowd in behind the walls of Athens, refuse direct engagement with the Spartans, and rely on their navy to both resupply the city and harass its enemies – was original, innovative, even daring. But it was not glorious – at least not in the Achillean sense. The bravado of engaging in combat, the excitement of it, are missing from Pericles’ strategy, and are replaced by a strategic brilliance that, it was hoped, would exhaust the Spartans. The glory Pericles is interested in is the glory of the city itself – preserving it was foremost in his mind. Those who would preserve it would merit glory not by virtue of how fiercely they wielded weapons but by virtue of the political project they saved.Footnote ²¹

Of course, Pericles is not the only character in Thucydides’ vast panorama who is interested in glory. There are certainly actors in the History who, closer to the Achillean mold, pursue it for self-aggrandizement rather than for political reasons. Chief among these is Alcibiades, who rashly advocates for the Sicilian Expedition in order to increase his personal renown. Alcibiades’ interest in glory is narcissistic – he is what Hobbes would later call “vainglorious,” insofar as he holds himself in higher esteem than he deserves. Rather than winning glory because he served the city, Alcibiades uses the city and engineers its political course in order to increase his own glory. He was, to quote Thucydides, “exceedingly ambitious of a command by which he hoped to reduce Sicily and Carthage and personally to gain in wealth and reputation by means of his success.”Footnote ²²

1.3 Cicero

Cicero’s On Obligations offers the most extensive treatment of glory in the Roman tradition. The orator apparently wrote a comprehensive treatise titled On Glory,Footnote ²³ but that book has been lost. The discussion in On Obligations likely summarizes that work.

Cicero begins by noting that glory should not be reserved for military achievements.Footnote ²⁴ His skepticism about the status of military exploits is likely tied to the fact that he was not a military man himself, and was keen to establish that civic accomplishments – of the kind he was responsible for during his legal career and consulship – were as important as any martial triumph.Footnote ²⁵ In fact, he tells us, military achievements can’t be more important than civic ones exactly because the former pursuits are often animated by a desire for winning glory rather than by the substantive importance of the project. The common assumption that accomplishments in war are most worthy of recognition has to be questioned. Civic achievements, like the legislation the famous lawgiver Solon wrote for Athens, are to be ranked higher than military victories accomplished by the likes of Themistocles (the hero of the Battle of Salamis between the Greeks and Persians in 480 bce), because while military victory “brought the state only momentary advantage … Solon’s reform [is] … of perennial benefit to it.”

Moreover, the promulgation of prudent policy makes military victories possible more often than the other way around – by creating the resources that support fighting, or by attracting the civilian support necessary for going to war. Therefore, we must “let arms unto the toga yield, the laurel to men’s praise.”Footnote ²⁶ That Cicero’s arguments for the primacy of civilian achievements are self-serving does not make them wrong. As Christopher Hitchens once put it in a moving essay on the legacy of Edmund Burke, “[T]he fact that you have located a man’s most selfish motive does not mean you have identified his best motive.”Footnote ²⁷ Cicero may have been both vain and correct about the importance of civic leadership.

Even more strikingly, Cicero suggests that civic achievements deserve the kind of glory that we typically reserve for military pursuits, not only because the former feats turn out to be more beneficial but also because they require the same kind of courage: “[T]here are instances of courage, then, on the home front which are on par with bravery in war; indeed they demand more application and effort than those in war.”Footnote ²⁸ Cicero does not quite explain how it is that policymaking requires physical courage. Perhaps he means that in Rome’s raucous political culture a miscalculation could put one in the same mortal danger that a military mistake would cause for a soldier. If that is what he had in mind, his claim is not wholly without merit.

Book II of On Obligations offers a sophisticated conceptual analysis of glory, but before diving into it, Cicero makes an interesting psychological observation: While it is always useful to be glorified or honored “both in general and in forging friendships in particular,” the need for glory and honor is different among different people.Footnote ²⁹ The first part of the statement is puzzling: How does being glorified help in forging friendships? And why would anyone want friends who were primarily interested in one’s glory? But the latter comment is insightful. We do not all want glory equally – and this may be true even among members of the political class. The need for glory, which Hobbes would posit as a universal feature of human psychology, operates differentially within different people. It’s likely that those who choose to live in the public eye are more drawn to glory than introverts who shun the limelight. But even among those more public figures some leaders are more retiring than others. One thinks, for example, about the difference between a Jimmy Carter and a Bill Clinton or, across the ocean, between a Shimon Peres and a Yitzhak Shamir. An interest in glory cannot be universally assumed in all political leaders.

Having made this observation, Cicero moves on to account for what goes into being glorified. He argues that the attainment of glory depends on three cumulative conditions: the affection of common people towards the exalted person, their trust in that person, and their belief (mingled with admiration) that the recipient is worthy of being glorified. And so, we learn that for Cicero glory turns on the attitudes of the nonaristocratic class. The affection of the commons (the first condition) is gained primarily by services rendered. (Did the exalted figure do nice things for “the people” like arranging handouts or putting on compelling entertainments?) It can also be obtained if the figure tried to render such services (even if unsuccessfully) or, finally, if that person has a reputation for generosity, kindness, justice, good faith, and other similar virtues. The second factor centers on the cultivation of trust. Cicero tells us that we trust those who we think are prudent (people who can deal with unexpected challenges better than we can) or those we believe to be good and just (those to whom we can hand over the care of our affairs and be reasonably confident they won’t take advantage of us). Between the two, Cicero argues that being just is more important: “Justice without prudence will be highly effective but prudence without justice will make no impact.”Footnote ³⁰ As in other parts of his work, it’s not completely clear if Cicero is making a descriptive or normative point here: Is he arguing that we should trust the just more than the prudent or that we in fact do? And it’s far from clear whether he is right about either the normative or descriptive claims (people may well actually trust a prudent leader more than a just one if they think the former can more readily advance their interests, and if government has an obligation to be effective, perhaps that is as it should be). As for the third factor, admiration, Cicero tells us that we admire great achievements that confound our expectations. We admire those who excel others in merit and are able to resist common weaknesses which others succumb to. Thus, we admire those who will give up money or disdain danger in favor of an important cause. Cicero concludes by arguing that the just person fills all three conditions for glory – he will attain affection and trust because he seeks to benefit the greatest number of citizens and he will attain admiration because he has the character traits that most of us lack and is able to despise temptations and danger.

Cicero does not argue very closely for this purported connection between glory and justice. Notably missing are considerations of outcome – the just leader is not necessarily the most successful one. Cicero does not go deeply into the comparative role of success and character as the grounds for glory. Thus, he does not include the creation of lasting political goods or the attainment of great military victories among his criteria for attaining glory. A relatively modest political leader who keeps the state on course, is a benefactor of the people, and behaves decently meets all of Cicero’s criteria for glory. As we will see shortly, this view will be roundly rejected by Machiavelli. Decency and glory may both be good, but they are not, the Florentine philosopher insists, the same thing.

Cicero moves finally to discuss glory’s temporal horizon. Becoming glorious, he tells us, is a long-term project: “[I]f people imagine they can obtain enduring glory by deceit and empty exhibitionism and hypocrisy in word and look, they are wildly off the mark; true glory drops roots and also spreads its branches wide whereas all false claims swiftly wither away like frail blossoms.”Footnote ³¹ It is here that Cicero most explicitly ties glory with morality. True glory is lasting and one only gets glorified for what deserves glory – for what is actually good. This is why he argues that glory “must be systematically both inquired and invested.” Glory is not the same as the fleeting adulation of contemporaries – it is about acting in a way that will, in time, be recognized as worthy of the highest praise. Once more, the account is set up to highlight the glory of the statesman rather than that of the warrior. While the triumph of the latter will likely result in immediate admiration (which may fade if it turns out that the military project was not in the real interest of the state), the statesman’s patient building of institutions and infrastructure can result in lasting glory, which will become manifest only after these political achievements start bearing fruit.

1.4 Machiavelli

For Machiavelli glory is the reward for great feats in domestic politics, diplomacy, and war.Footnote ³² Thus, for example, founding kingdoms and republics is a sure way to win political glory.Footnote ³³ Setting up despotic cities, in contrast, cannot result in glory. Machiavelli’s conception of glory has a normative component. While he famously argues that it is necessary for a prince to learn how “not to be good” and to use that skill as needed in order to maintain the state, while it may be necessary for the prince to be both lion and fox, while he might need to lie, dissemble, and practice cruelty in order to stay in power – to do these things gratuitously cannot yield glory. Knowing how to be wicked and how wicked one must be in order to stay in power and keep one’s city strong is one thing – the prince who gets that balance right will win political glory and deserve it – but wickedness for its own sake is another. A murderous leader who fails to economize on cruelty cannot be described as glorious even if successful. Hence the famous discussion in The Prince of Agathocles – who in spite of his remarkable achievements cannot be described as glorious because he was incapable of practicing restraint.Footnote ³⁴

Machiavelli limits the proper application of the term “glory” to exalted military or political achievements. The label is a form of “super recognition” primarily open to the cream of the political class and Machiavelli would have likely resisted widening its application to more pedestrian activities such as athletic competitions or scholarly attainment.Footnote ³⁵ Further, for Machiavelli, glory is not a “side effect” of good governance; it’s not something that simply accrues to a leader in the course of ruling well. Rather, it’s something that a leader should actively pursue. Refusing to do so can lead to the decay of the state; for a prince to dismiss the pursuit of glory is a problem in itself – an indication of flagging political energy. Politics should not become the realm of patient, low-key management;Footnote ³⁶ rather, seeking glory is what the true leader does. True, a prince can’t become glorious if he becomes completely unmoored from principles, but to turn from glory, to dismiss it, to reject its pursuit as hubristic, is to practice the kind of otherworldly politics that Machiavelli disdains.Footnote ³⁷

So while Machiavelli, like other Renaissance thinkers, seeks to revive Greek and Roman understandings of political virtue, while he accepts the humanistic premise that worldly success is, to a significant degree, a function of agency rather than of luck, while he rejects the Christian admonition offered by Boethius, Aquinas and their ilk to renounce the quest for worldly glory because we can’t control whether or not we obtain it, his interpretation of the virtues is different from that of Cicero or Seneca. The virtues necessary for winning glory go beyond the traditional, earnest list that Cicero enumerated (including wisdom, justice, honesty, courage, and temperance). They must, instead, include the ability to lie and cheat when needed. Machiavelli sets himself in direct opposition to the Romans here. In Book II of On Obligations, Cicero warned that “if anyone thinks that he can win lasting glory by pretense, by empty show, by hypocritical talk and looks, he is very much mistaken.”Footnote ³⁸ Machiavelli, in contrast, famously insists that these vices are sometimes necessary for ruling well. The question is not whether a prince practices them, but whether he does so parsimoniously and in the service of a great cause.

Political feats often require pretense, empty show, and hypocritical talk. These do not disqualify anyone from becoming glorious. Machiavelli, the great nonideal theorist, learned that much from his missions on behalf of the Florentine Signoria and Dieci to the courts of King Louis, Cesare Borgia, and Pope Julius II. The virtues of the prince will include what the classical humanists considered vices. Achieving glory is going to require knowing how to practice these vices prudently, knowing how “not to be good,” and deploying that knowledge selectively.Footnote ³⁹ The main question is not whether the prince will lie and pretend – for lie and pretend he must to maintain his rule and achieve political greatness. Rather, the question is whether he lies more than he must, whether he pretends gratuitously.Footnote ⁴⁰

While Machiavelli’s focus is on the prince’s pursuit of glory, he does recognize that the term can motivate the people as well. Many years in Florence’s diplomatic service taught him how vulnerable a state was if it depended on mercenary armies for defense. Mercenaries were notoriously fickle, and because they fought for money, they would often change sides if offered a better deal. The Florentines were not, for example, served well by their mercenary forces in their attempts to keep control of Pisa. Both as a policymaker and as a theorist, Machiavelli argued for the superiority of militia armies, and in 1509, he organized and successfully led a Florentine militia against Pisa. Militiamen fought not for money but for the security of the state and the interests of their kin. Their soldiers were, in other words, animated by patriotism, and for such fighters, there could be glory in the fight.

In chapter 25 of The Prince, as he reflects on the conduct of Pope Julius II, Machiavelli offers us an interesting observation about the relationship between glory and luck. Julius was impetuous and full of energy; he liked to charge forward, to act rather than carefully consider possible courses of action. Those characteristics happened to work for the geopolitical circumstances of the time – Julius was, as we are fond of saying, the right man at the right time. And, as Machiavelli notes dryly, he died early enough that the times did not change and make his character an impediment: “I wish to let stand his other actions, which were all the same, and all of which succeeded well for him. And the brevity of his life did not let him feel the contrary. For if times would have come which would have made him need to proceed with care, his ruin would have followed – he would have never deviated from those modes to which nature inclined him.”Footnote ⁴¹

In other words, much of Pope Julius’ legacy, much of whatever glory he obtained, was a result of luck, or what contemporary philosophers sometimes call “moral luck” – he benefitted from a fortunate congruity between his psychological makeup and the political moment he operated in – an overlap between “constitutional luck” and “circumstance luck.”Footnote ⁴² Had he lived longer, he would have probably met with failure as conditions changed and called for a person of greater prudence. Glory, this discussion suggests, at least when it is understood as a lasting legacy, is intertwined with luck; it depends on the circumstances that prevailed when a leader was in power, on how long they lived, and on how (a factor Machiavelli does not consider) social conventions evolved during and after the leader’s lifetime. Churchill lived long enough for his character to both unmake him because of his impetuosity, and remake him by virtue of his courage and pugnaciousness when the Nazis came along. And, as social mores evolved after his death, Churchill’s staunch imperialism and his attitude towards women had, with time, dampened his legacy again.Footnote ⁴³

Finally, in the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli also offers us an interesting meditation on the risks of glory for those who stay alive long enough to claim their own renown. If Pericles provides an argument about why it is easier to glorify the dead, Machiavelli gives us a reminder of how dangerous glory can become for the living. A military commander who returns gloriously triumphant from battle has typically earned so much respect and reverence from fellow soldiers, enemies, and citizens that he poses an immediate threat to the political leadership of the country that sent him. Glory will often generate a toxic ingratitude towards those who won it and lived to tell: “[T]he commander who has skillfully acquired an empire for his lord by overcoming his enemies and showering himself with glory, and his troops with riches, necessarily acquires among his own soldiers and his enemies and among the subjects of his prince such renown that his victory cannot prove other than distasteful to the very lord who sent him forth.”Footnote ⁴⁴

1.5 Hobbes

Our preoccupation with glory is, according to Hobbes, an important reason why we can’t live without a strong government to keep us in check. That fixation is a psychological feature that both makes us dangerous to each other in the absence of government, and that gives the government, once established, something powerful to work with when it wants to motivate us to pursue certain political projects.

Our interest in glory can be retrospective or forward-looking. Retrospective glory consists in the pleasure one takes in superior past achievements. A forward-looking desire for glory drives the seeker to obtain more power than others (so that she can, later on, glory in these attainments). As Gabriella Slomp notes, the centrality of glory for Hobbes recedes as we move to his later texts.Footnote ⁴⁵ Whereas in earlier writings, a desire for winning more glory than others is the main driver of human conflict, generating competition and jealousies, by the time he writes the Leviathan, Hobbes comes to see glory as one of several passions (in addition to fear and the desire for scarce resources) that generate strife. Even in the later work, though, glory and honor seeking are important for understanding why humans, unlike, say, ants and bees, can’t live sociably without government: “[M]en are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity, which these [other] creatures are not; and consequently, amongst men there ariseth on that ground, Envy and Hatred, and finally Warre; but amongst these not so.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Hobbes famously offers a distinction between glory and vainglory. The former is grounded in a factually correct reading of one’s history of achievements and how they are perceived by others. The latter consists in taking empty flattery too seriously and developing an inflated sense of one’s worth. The vainglorious are legends in their own minds: They think they achieved more than they actually have, or they are happy to listen to those who falsely tell them that’s the case. Vainglory is a passion that can lead to criminality as the vainglorious often assume they are above the law. Vainglory also makes those afflicted more prone to anger since their inflated sense of self leads them to feel insulted easily.Footnote ⁴⁷

While the traditional reading of Hobbes by scholars such as Strauss, Walzer, and Pettit emphasizes the competition for recognition as an important cause of strife, others, like Clifton Mark, focus on the destabilizing role of insult.Footnote ⁴⁸ On this interpretation, the same desire for glory that prompts citizens to jostle for comparative position also makes them “prickly”Footnote ⁴⁹ or sensitive to offense. Such prickliness can incite violence over trivialities – “for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Some interpreters disagree about how psychologically central the desire for glory really is for Hobbes. According to Slomp, Hobbes attributes greater motivational force to self-preservation than to glory. The passions, according to her reading, will rarely lead us to die rather than endure humiliation.Footnote ⁵¹ On Peg Birmingham’s reading, in contrast, we want to be admired so badly that we become dangerous when we can’t have the recognition we crave; thus, it is the desire for glory, more than anything else, that generates the suspicion and fear which, in turn, necessitate the state.Footnote ⁵²

Regardless of its psychological gravity, it should be stressed that glory, for Hobbes, is a social passion; its full realization depends on the institutions of civil society. We certainly desire glory in the state of nature, but given the relative equality between agents in that state, it doesn’t make sense to view oneself as consistently superior to others or to demand recognition of our superiority. As Hobbes put it, “[T]he question who is the better man has no place in the condition of meer nature.”Footnote ⁵³ The law, by defining standards of value and worth, introduces the possibility of actually winning a competition based on one’s talents and efforts as well as the security necessary to enjoy the results of that victory.Footnote ⁵⁴

Given Hobbes’ moral skepticism, the objects of glory can’t have an objective status. It’s a psychological fact about us that we want glory, as far as Hobbes is concerned, and given that psychological fact, it’s a social fact that governments must designate objects of glory. But the objects so designated are not glorious in themselves; the goals that the state marks as glorious – as important enough to endow those who pursue them with glory – are made such by the very act of designation, by political decision. Just as with his beliefs about morality or the status of laws, for Hobbes the objects of glory are glorious by convention rather than by nature.Footnote ⁵⁵

1.6 Arendt

In a 1944 article for Aufbau, a periodical published in New York and aimed primarily at German Jewish emigres, Arendt approvingly quotes the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising who described the rebellion as an act that salvages “the honor and glory of the Jewish people.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The rebels, Arendt wrote, stepped beyond an ethos of victimhood. Doing that “ended the pariah existence of the Jewish people in Europe” and positioned them as equal actors in the struggle against the Nazis: “[B]y claiming equal rights [Jews] joined the ranks of other European peoples in the struggle for freedom.” Political equality and glory are acquired, on this view, by the willingness to become master of one’s own fate, take a risk, and die for a cause. The cause was primarily the liberation of Jews: “[T]hey intend to battle as Jews for the freedom of Jews.” The shape of the new Europe, Arendt thought, was being molded by underground movements, and in fighting the Nazis in Warsaw, Jews claimed their place in that effort. And, because they have, one could now start plausibly speaking of Jewish honor and glory: “Honor and glory are new words in the vocabulary of our people,” she wrote, excitedly. “We would perhaps have to go back to the days of the Maccabees to hear such language.” To be glorious, then, on this early reflection from Arendt, was to be willing to take a mortal risk for a grand project, and the project, in this case, was the establishment of an active Jewish identity that would earn its place among other national movements.Footnote ⁵⁷ The theory of glory on offer here is essentially the same as the one articulated by Pericles in the funeral oration. Glory was the result of sacrificing for a worthy cause; the renown is refracted from the political purpose served.

Arendt’s later work, especially The Human Condition, contains a more nuanced discussion of glory. Humans, she argues, are characterized by the refusal to be determined by the constraints of the “human condition” (mortality and confinement to the planet to name two). As she puts it, “[O]ur life conditions never fully condition us.”Footnote ⁵⁸ If glory’s reward is a kind of immortality or escape from our mortal confinement, as Pericles suggests, Arendt provides us with a context for understanding why such a reward is so appealing. Humans are the only mortal species, Arendt argues, since only they possess individual self-awareness including the realization that one day they will cease to exist. It is this awareness of impending individual extinction that makes people interested in immortality in the first place. And for Arendt, the most promising route to immortality is through lasting works: “[B]y their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave non-perishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality not-withstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a ‘divine’ nature.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Part of what makes glory so attractive to us, in other words, is that we desperately want the immortality it promises, simply by virtue of being human.

In chapter 2 of The Human Condition, Arendt sketches a “Greek” understanding of politics. According to this view, politics is a second life away from the privacy of home. If “home” is concerned with meeting life’s physical demands, politics is an ascent from such necessities and is, thus, the realm of freedom.Footnote ⁶⁰ Politics is the realm of words and actions divorced from the “merely” useful. Far more being a mechanism for problem-solving, politics is the context where free and thoughtful beings can be most themselves.Footnote ⁶¹ For Arendt, then, the political is not all about finding an efficient way to adjudicate private concerns and protect property, as it would be in a Lockean view. Property is important but only as the instrumental condition for facilitating interactions that are not about property or its administration.Footnote ⁶² The teleology of politics as expressed in the liberal tradition is thus reversed: Private property gives us a place to hide from the public when we need to rest, but that private space is what makes possible an ascent to politics.Footnote ⁶³

The modern state, Arendt argues, has become the realm of collective housekeeping.Footnote ⁶⁴ Society is the public organization of the means of survival, it is merely the household writ largeFootnote ⁶⁵ and that is a perversion of what politics means or at least of what it once did for the Greeks. Necessity is a pre-political phenomenon. Meeting our basic needs can’t be the main object of politics.

In her juxtaposition between Greek and modern politics, Arendt gives us a diagnosis, an explanation, for why the interest in glory has subsided in the last few centuries. Glory is about immortality, about ambitions aimed beyond the limitations of the everyday. But contemporary politics, according to her, is consumed with the everyday and its management. The modern political realm has turned into a “social” realm and the social realm understands people in statistical terms. Politics is now the realm of social science and political economy and is focused primarily on predicting and regulating large-scale behavior.Footnote ⁶⁶ The social is concerned with standardization and understanding the “behavior” of large groups rather than with the “deeds” of excellent, free, and equal agents. Glory, of course, depends on deeds – on individual courage, excellence, and other virtues. Consider this, based on Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,”Footnote ⁶⁷ which captures Arendt’s idea of the social, with its quantitative and statistical preoccupations, perfectly:

Small wonder that Auden admired Arendt’s work as much as he did. “Every now and then, I come across a book which gives me the impression of having been especially written for me,” he said of The Human Condition.Footnote ⁶⁸

On the Greek view, the public realm offers engagement with what is immortal and permanent – ideas, institutions, great works. Whatever glimpses of immortality humans can get, they get in their political activities.Footnote ⁶⁹ The modern reimagining of politics as an instrument for the regulation of private lives bespeaks a decline of interest in this type of immortality. Creating permanent works, leaving behind a lasting legacy, becoming known for great deeds – these ambitions are no longer integral to the practice of politics. In so far as glory is tied up with a desire for permanence and immortality as Thucydides suggests, this change in the nature of politics is also a move away from glory.

The Greeks had a contempt for what Arendt calls “laboring” – the effort required to sustain our physical needs and survival. This disdain stemmed from “a passionate striving for freedom from necessity and a no less passionate impatience with every effort that left no trace, no monument, no great work worthy of remembrance.”Footnote ⁷⁰ On their view, humans are fully alive only when they strive to leave something behind that outlasts them. Simply providing for the means of subsistence and coordinating the basic needs of many individuals would have struck them as anti-political, as an organized activity that ignores the potential of our species. “All ancient estimates of human activities,” Arendt wrote, “… rest on the conviction that the labor of our body which is necessitated by its needs is slavish.”Footnote ⁷¹ We now live in a laboring and consuming society. The key political project in such a society is to make the objects of consumption abundantly available: “[W]e have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.”Footnote ⁷² This elevation of “labor” in modern political practice and thought creates societies that are less violent than before. In antiquity, violence was used to subjugate some in order to free others from labors. But, according to Arendt, the people now living under these relatively peaceful conditions have become subjugated instead to an ethos of laboring and consumption.Footnote ⁷³

Later in The Human Condition, Arendt gives us her famous account of action (as distinct from labor and work) and that discussion sheds further light on what glory does and does not mean for her. Our actions and speech are directed at others and take place in the presence of others (be that presence actual or imagined). Thus, the meaning of any action is not exhausted by what the actor intended by it. Each act is projected into a web of existing human relationships and connections (and, in turn, makes that web more intricate and richer). Since this is the nature of action – that it always enters into a complicated relational web where others are acting as well – we are never fully in control of the consequences of our actions.Footnote ⁷⁴ This understanding of action suggests that, for Arendt, the glorious deed is not a case of the individual molding the environment with their determination and courage. Rather, a deed becomes glorious through its reverberations in our relational web – through responses to it and interpretations of it. Action largely gains its significance ex post facto. Like some of the other thinkers we have surveyed, Arendt is offering us a comment on the uncertainty of glory: Though we are interested in it because we seek permanence, judgments about anyone’s glory depend on a history of perceptions, receptions, and interpretations. Actions will become glorious as their significance ricochets around this relational web, and the legacy they leave is not guaranteed to be everlasting. Churchill’s reputation may be up in the aftermath of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler and Britain’s stance in the first year of the war, it may then decline after the war, decline even more when his unapologetic imperialist sympathies become unacceptable to a growing swath of people, and then it may rebound, decades later, when a new set of tyrants is on the march and people think back fondly on the old leader’s courage in the face of foreign bullying. There’s no blueprint to comprehensively evaluate an action in advance in the same way you can evaluate an artifact’s design. Because action takes shape in a web of relationships, its meaning is both boundless and unpredictable, and its full significance is gradually articulated and rearticulated in time.Footnote ⁷⁵

In her posthumously published “Introduction into Politics,” Arendt shares some further observations about the conditions for ascribing political glory. Reflecting on contemporary war, she argues that nuclear weapons cannot be understood as a means for conducting politics in the Clausewitzian mode – nuclear war is not the continuation of politics by other means – because they destroy the very conditions for politics, namely the “world” or the relational web between people.Footnote ⁷⁶ There can be no glory in a nuclear war because such a war undermines the possibility of action (including glorious action), by destroying the context, the set of connections into which we act. Under these circumstances, glory could, perhaps, be reserved for those who avert wars – in the process literally saving the world. One thinks here, for example, of Khrushchev and Kennedy managing to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. In other words, Arendt’s argument suggests that, when changes in military technology threaten the very possibility of action, glory, rather than being found in military exploits, will be found in avoiding them. If this extrapolation is plausible, it brings her position closer to that of Cicero than to that of Machiavelli.

Later in that same essay, Arendt tells us that the locus of greatness differs between the Greeks and Romans. For the former, politics happens inside the polis, in the agora – between equal and free citizens who ascend from the privacy of their homes. International affairs, in contrast, are simply the realm of power – the strong doing what they can and the weak accepting what they must, to quote Thucydides. Greatness is found, as Pericles argued in the funeral oration, in the city’s institutions, the way of life it affords, and its culture. Glory is allotted to those who excel inside that form of life and, arguably, to those who defend it when a defense is needed.Footnote ⁷⁷ For the Romans, however, politics is primarily about expanding permanent alliances; glory adheres to foreign policy projects. If for the Greeks the law creates a boundary around the polis in which greatness can be pursued, for the Romans the very ability to extend boundaries, to make legal arrangements and contracts that grow the empire, is the locus of glory.Footnote ⁷⁸

1.7 Summary

In this chapter, we offered a whirlwind tour of the history of thinking about glory. We began with the “Achillean” conception of the term, which is focused on celebrating how rather than why one fights; such glory is predicated on technical skill and achievement rather than the kind of project for which one fights. We then contrasted this idea with its “Periclean” counterpart, wherein glory is fundamentally moral and political, a form of recognition that is based not on one’s aptitude but on their willingness to take a risk for a noble cause. Next, we discussed Cicero’s classical account of glory. The Roman orator argues that civic pursuits are more worthy of glory than military ones, both because the former often make the latter possible and because they frequently are more closely aligned with the state’s true interests. Cicero also holds that true glory unfolds in time and that there is an inherent connection between personal virtue, the capacity for doing justice, and deserving high recognition. Machiavelli is far more circumspect about the connection between personal virtue and glory. While he argues that glory has a normative dimension, it is completely possible to glorify a prince who neglected the traditional virtues in order to maintain the state. For Machiavelli, an interest in glory was constitutive of competent leadership and the objects of glory were necessarily exalted: success in war, high diplomacy, or institution building on a grand scale. Hobbes’ emphasis is more psychological – our need for glory, he claims, both makes us dangerous enough to each other to require the social mediation offered by government, and gives governments a tool they can use to direct individuals towards their purposes. Finally, we considered the connection Arendt drew between a “Greek” understanding of politics, where the private realm is subordinated to public “action,” and the emphasis on immortality and permanence fundamental to the idea of glory.

With this overview of thought about glory in mind, we now proceed, in Chapter 2, to explore some of the key conceptual questions the pursuit of glory raises and to construct a historically informed, rudimentary theory of political glory.