Kahn, Paul

Crossing the Border Between Law and Sovereignty (Chapter 5 of Sacred Violence). “The sovereign is born in a sacrificial shedding of blood that marks a new appearance of the sacred.”
Philosophy and the Politics of Unreason (Paper). “Regardless of its position on health care, the state is also an institution willing to deploy violence, death, and destruction. Our national narrative is organized around killing and being killed, at least as much as it is around the lowering of mortality rates or increasing gross domestic product.”

Kantorowicz, Ernst H.

The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Book Excerpts).“At a certain moment in history the state appeared as a corpus mysticum comparable to the Church. Hence, pro patria mori, death for the sake of that mystico-political body became meaningful, as it was considered equal in value to the death for the Christian faith, for the Church, or for the Holy Land.”

Levene, Mark

Linderman, Gerald F.

Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (Book Excerpts). “The linkage between honor and courage manifested itself in Civil War solders’ frequent referenced to the ‘honorable death’—inevitably the courageous death— and the ‘honorable wound’—inevitably suffered in the course of courageous action.”

Lockwood, Renee

Sacrifice and the Creation of Group of Identity: Case Studies of Gallipoli and Masada. “It has often been acknowledged that nations are born of war. Yet recent scholarship suggests that it is not the sacrifice of the enemy that creates a unified group identity, but the sacrifice of the group’s own."

MacMillan, Margaret

McPherson, James

For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Book Excerpts).
“Civil War soldiers wrote about courage, bravery, valor—the mark of honor. But they wrote even more about cowardice—the mark of dishonor. Most wanted to avoid the shame of being known as a coward—this is what gave them courage. Civil War soldiers went forward into a hail of bullets because they were more afraid of showing the ‘white feather’ than they were of death."

Mineau, André

Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik

Mosse, George L.

National Cemeteries and National Revival: The Cult of the Fallen Soldiers in Germany (Paper). “The cult of the fallen assimilated basic themes of Christianity. The exclamation ‘Now we are made sacred’ implied an analogy of the sacrifice in war to the passion and resurrection of Christ.”

Murphy, Raymond E.

Neumann, Boaz

Porter, Thomas Earl

Rahimi, Babak

The Transhuman Soldier: A Comparative Look at World War I and the Iran-Iraq War (paper). With his sacrifice, the soldier transforms the ordinary cycle of existence into something livelier and more transhuman. His sacrifice on the battlefield becomes a creative event to conquer death. He attains a sacred quality with his ability to generate an all-too-superhuman vitality, a sacred death of transcendental reality."

Rayle, Crystal