As Robert Pirro points out more than a few times in this big, sprawling, and captivating book, tragedy in ancient Athens came into existence at almost the same time as democracy. Was this mere coincidence or were the two new institutions coimplicated? Did tragic theater help constitute the community needed by the new democratic order? Did it help citizens negotiate their transition from aristocracy to democracy, mysticism to rationality? Did it help them resituate their identification from the heroes of the mythic world to the more ordinary people of the new legal order? Did tragedy perhaps enhance Athenians’ sense of agency even as it taught the limits of human capacities in a finite world? Did it give new emotional form to democratic citizens by way of catharsis and the sorts of fellow-feeling that exposure to suffering and mortality brings or did such exposure perhaps make them resigned to their finitude and undo any sense of possibility?

These are some of the important questions in circulation as Pirro examines in detail the recourse to the language of tragedy by various political actors, artists, and authors in a wide variety of contexts. The book's sense of sprawl comes not from its length—it is not overly long—but rather from its division into three parts covering tragedy's relationship to agency, solidarity, identity—and also from the rather far flung topics of the ten chapters, which focus on Bobby Kennedy, Vaclav Havel, Italian neorealist film (in which the tragic chorus is variously reinvented and restaged), Cornel West, Nelson Mandela, and September 11, and three chapters on German authors and filmmakers in the context of German reunification. What all the figures studied share is their use of the terms “tragedy” or “tragic” in a context of transition. (Here Pirro is somewhat referential in his approach, assuming, as an ordinary-language philosopher would, that the meaning of the term is in its use, but also, and perhaps for that reason, neglecting to ask after cases of tragedy or tragic emplotment where the term itself is not used but its meanings are in play, nonetheless [or therefore].) Pirro generally treats tragedy as a promising resource for democratic politics, arguing throughout that it promotes empowerment more than resignation, community more than withdrawal, and a sense of hope more than hopelessness. The risks of tragedy are fatalism, self-exculpation, resignation, and irresponsibility. The promise of tragedy is its capacity to endow life with meaning, institute the community forms on which democratic life depends, and issue calls to agency and solidarity in the face of near impossible challenges.

We might even say that Pirro looks to tragedy to serve as a sort of secular religion. This is suggested when he chastises Robert Bellah for failing to notice the promise of tragedy in the American context. Lamenting the loss of religion in American culture, Bellah calls for a “religious revivalism,” but never follows up on what Pirro clearly considers a more promising alternative, intimated by Bellah himself in a set of “scattered acknowledgments of the promise of tragedy to respond to America's crisis of meaning and opportunity.” Here, in one of this book's many fine moments, Pirro eyes the right detail and knows what to make of it: he notes that Bellah himself, in passing, sees that Melville and Hawthorne, as well as Faulkner and Lincoln, “showed that even in this raw new country tragic understanding was possible.” Why then, Pirro asks, should Bellah treat religion as the only option for those in quest of meaning-making resources? Pirro's point, contra Bellah, is that religion is not the only option here. Tragedy offers an alternative “for those who seek to live decent and meaningful lives in a world that appears irrevocably disenchanted” (138). If tragedy could reinhabit myth in the fifth century, why could it not replace or reorient religion in the twenty-first?

But what about those for whom disenchantment is not the problem, and replacement or tragic reorientation not the solutions to it? The pages on Robert Bellah (which come at the end of the 9/11 chapter in section 2) are preceded (two chapters earlier, at the end of section 1), by a chapter on the work of Cornel West, in which Pirro culls that writer's many dispersed and unsystematic references to tragedy and the tragic to show a pattern of thinking about the promise of tragedy for the disempowered members of a would-be democratic order. In this chapter, one of the best in the book, Pirro does for West what he did earlier for Hannah Arendt in Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy: he reads scattered references to tragedy in such a persistent and concentrated way that a compelling case emerges for the fundamental importance of that concept to the thinker under examination. Pirro argues that West has over the course of his career been giving shape to a tragic Christianity, a tragic pragmatism, a tragic Marxism, and more. The chapter is a tour de force. But note that here, in the context of Cornel West's work, tragedy supplements Christianity; it is not—as it is assumed to be, in the reading of Bellah—an alternative to it. This raises what is surely a key question for Pirro's project: Is tragedy an alternative to religion or is it an alternative way of being religious (or of being democratic)?

Pirro does not ask the question and the opportunity is missed. If the West chapter had come after the one on September 11, that might have been better: the ordering might not have been chronological—most of the work by West that is Pirro's focus is from the 80s and 90s, that is, from before September 11—but conceptually West would be seen as offering a counter to Bellah, on whose earlier work he indeed had commented. (For commentary on West's changing reception of Bellah's book, see Bellah, “Reading and Misreading Habits of the Heart,” Sociology of Religion 68, no. 2 [2007], 190.) A more sustained examination of the two thinkers together might have presented West as countering Bellah's effort to promote religious revival and (more subtly) minimize or marginalize the tragic dimensions of American public culture.

Moreover, thinking about West and Bellah in detail together might have pressed Pirro to say more about what exactly tragedy offers democracy that religion, in his view, can no longer provide, or how exactly a tragic sensibility (or a tragicomic one, the position to which West is reported to have moved more recently) might rescue religion, or Christianity, from irrelevance or dogmatism in an age of disenchantment?

There are several other standout moments in this book, more than I can list here. One is the book's opening, an incredibly moving portrait of Bobby Kennedy's quest for a way to survive his brother's assassination, ultimately finding sustenance in the fifth-century tragedians introduced to him by way of Edith Hamilton, their popularizer in the 1960s. This sets up a nest of issues that are in play and are mentioned but not addressed in detail in the chapters that follow, which have to do with the vexed cultural capital of tragedy as a high-culture genre in an age of mass mediation and with how (and why!) to distinguish tragedy, a high-culture genre, from melodrama, its low-culture cousin. Moreover, since Pirro treats tragedy for the most part as an institution (in the ancient context), or as a word (in the contemporary context), albeit one with institution-like promise, or as a philosophical position—the tragic—the question of genre, as such, does not arise.

Perhaps appropriately for a book on tragedy, this book's great strength is also its flaw. The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship impresses with its ambition and scope: Pirro has read widely in all of the areas covered and synthesizes the main issues very well. Readers will be well served by his deft handling of masses of material and by his bibliography. But at the same time the book does not quite live up to the promised ambition and scope. The chapters are loosely linked, not always in dialogue with each other (Cornel West might also have been a good interlocutor for chapter 9, “Michael Schorr's Schultze Gets the Blues: German Borrowings from the New World African Tragic”), and if a central argument emerges, it does so a bit barely. This is in part because of the minimal cross-referencing between the chapters but also because the book assumes throughout the usefulness of tragedy to democracy, almost as if its ubiquity in contemporary democratic discourse was a marker of its value and salience rather than the opposite. Still, how could any contemporary democratic theorist interested in the politics of culture resist a book that glides effortlessly from, among many others, McNamara (who emplotted the Vietnam war as tragic) to Havel, Rossellini, Mandela, Christa Wolf, and Hannah Arendt? That in so doing, the book navigates its way from the abdication of political responsibility to its fullest assumption is an expression of precisely the hope that Pirro invests in tragedy and its promise for democracy.