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The term political theater refers to two separate but related ideas. The first is the idea of politics through theater: the use of theater as a vehicle for the expression of political action. The second is the metaphor of politics as theater: a resemblance of political action to the character of dramatic events enacted upon a stage. Both ideas date back to the emergence of theater itself in the ancient world, and both continue to inform contemporary political life.

Politics Through Theater

Theater, from its earliest incarnations, has had a decidedly political character. In ancient Athens, theater served as the centerpiece of an annual festival that was civic as well as religious in character—politics and religion not being so neatly separated in the ancient world as they are today. The tragedies and comedies presented at these festivals, at least the small fraction of them that have survived to the present day, typically addressed current political issues directly (e.g., Aeschylus’s The Persians and Aristophanes’s Lysistrata) and through myth (Aesschylus’s Oresteia and Euripides’s The Trojan Women). The potential disruptive effect of these dramas, and their centrality to the moral education of Athenian society, led Plato to famously feel obliged to banish these artists from his ideal city for fear of their corruptive effect on the character of the young.

The intervening centuries have seen powerful and compelling instances of political theater in this first sense, with its most profound political insights often accompanying its heights of artistic achievement. William Shakespeare’s revision of the available dramatic genres to encompass the history play as well as the historical tragedy produced some of the most incisive studies of political action in all of literature. Henrik Ibsen’s great dramas of psychological realism also included some of his era’s most important political explorations, from A Doll’s House to An Enemy of the People. The dramatic works of George Bernard Shaw and of Bertolt Brecht, though sometimes criticized for their didacticism, explicitly engaged in political argument through the ideologically laden monologues of their protagonists as well as the complex social situations they confronted. Great dramas of the mid-twentieth century, such as Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, and of the late twentieth century, such as David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna, were notable for the way their political messages were integral to their artistic aims without overpowering them.

Theater As Metaphor For Politics

More subtle, yet perhaps also more significant, is political theater in the second sense, as a metaphor for the nature of political life. One part of the metaphor involves the idea of roles and character. The claim that character matters centrally in representative government, particularly the American presidency, has been so widely repeated as to establish a resilient cliché. But this idea in turn draws on the notion that political actors are enacting roles separate from their own private selves, entailing their own internally justified standards of evaluation. This metaphor goes back to Cicero and the ancient rhetoricians, who frequently described the public official through the metaphor of someone enacting a role on a stage, as a way of emphasizing the importance of context and circumstance in the moral evaluation of political action—a metaphor widely repeated in the Renaissance by writers such as Erasmus, Thomas More, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. Martin Luther based his argument that Christians were entitled to exercise power and coercion in public life on an analogy to the theory of roles. Thomas Hobbes likewise argued that the state was the authorized representative of its citizens in the same sense that a playwright was the author of the deeds of the actor whose role he creates. More recently, Arthur Applbaum has criticized role-based moralities, arguing for sharp limits to the kinds of moral permissions that such arguments can provide.

Another element of the metaphor that has drawn attention particularly among political theorists is the idea of political life as an arena of tragedy and conflict. The roots of this aspect of the metaphor are several. One origin can be found in Hannah Arendt’s account of action and the agonistic political theories it helped to inspire. Arendt’s action, the central value of her political theory, bears a close resemblance to theatrical action: Its significance lies in the visibility of its memorable deeds to a public of appreciative spectators. Yet the unpredictability and irreversibility of such action places the possibility of tragedy at the center of public life. This tendency is exacerbated when combined with another important element of contemporary political thought, the value pluralism associated with such thinkers as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams. For these theorists, society’s deepest value commitments—to liberty and equality, justice and charity, utility and moral integrity—may simply be incompatible with one another, and tragedy, specifically the account of it offered by G. W. F. Hegel, captures artistically this core fact about the human moral experience. J. Peter Euben and Martha Nussbaum are two figures who have combined elements of these strains of contemporary political thought to offer an account of politics in which the idea of tragedy plays a conspicuous and important role. Of course, the idea that the deep value conflicts of tragedy may find their fullest expression in actual politics has come to be a theme of contemporary drama as well. It finds a striking illustration in playwright David Hare’s 2004 work Stuff Happens, a dramatic rendering of the George W. Bush administration’s march to war in Iraq in which most of the dialogue merely replicates statements actually made by President Bush and his advisers publicly during the run-up to the war.

Stagecraft

The most influential and widely appreciated aspect of the metaphor has been its implicit comparison of political action to the manipulative or deceptive aspects of stagecraft.

Political scientists frequently refer to leaders as political actors and to the public as the audience those actors are trying to sway. Almost half a century ago, historian Daniel Boorstin identified the emerging phenomenon of what he called pseudo-events: staged occurrences, such as campaign rallies, that existed for no other purpose than to be reported.

Today, pseudo-events in this sense make up the sizable majority of all the activities we collectively designate as constituting a political “campaign.” Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas may have gathered a crowd for the purpose of trying to persuade their fellow citizens, but at one of today’s rallies, politicians instead contrive to stage-manage a noisy, enthusiastic, and vacuous pageant solely to produce suitable footage for the free media coverage for which the “rally” provides the nominal excuse. Reports abound of presidential candidates planting the audience with scripted questioners, and even the startling case in which U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrators were caught staging an entire press conference—with FEMA staffers masquerading, by implication at least, as journalists— no longer falls outside the realm of believability. As a telling a sign of the times, the fact that a leading political columnist for The New York Times, Frank Rich, trained for the role by serving for many years as that newspaper’s drama critic—the two roles are no longer so cleanly separable as they once might have been.

There is no doubt that we now treat the spheres of politics and entertainment as, if not interchangeable, then at least closely intertwined, with the skills gained in entertainment permitting actors such as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger to transition seamlessly from one arena to the other. And there can be little doubt that this has proven Murray Edelman largely correct in viewing contemporary public life as being as much as anything else the task of “constructing the political spectacle.” Whether this trend will prove to be entirely a negative for democratic politics, or whether some of the positive aspects of the theatrical metaphor can be tapped to balance against the negative ones, is a question yet to be resolved.

Bibliography:

Applbaum, Arthur. Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Edelman, Murray. Constructing the Political Spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Euben, J. Peter. The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Hegel, G.W. F. Hegel on Tragedy, edited by Anne Paolucci and Henry Paolucci. Smyrna, Del.: Griffon House, 2001.
Kaufmann,Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.
Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Pirro, Robert C. Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 1985

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