Perspectives on Political Science, 41:181–189, 2012 Copyright C  Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1045-7097 print / 1930-5478 online DOI: 10.1080/10457097.2012.713260 Shakespeare, the Body Politic, and Liberal Democracy BERNARD J. DOBSKI and DUSTIN A. GISH Abstract: We argue for the relevance of a contemporary re- turn to Shakespeare because his work prompts thinking about the “Body Politic,” perhaps the most vivid and enduring im- age in speech describing political community ever proposed. Shakespeare’s meditation on this image invites us to reflect on the conditions under which a body politic can be made whole; that the constitution of any formal commonwealth requires a self-conscious articulation of the body politic and that this articulation could not happen without the parts them- selves being aware of their partial character within the whole political order. The need for the consent of those parts in the political order to which they would belong thus becomes sud- denly more evident. Shakespeare’s plays show that this need for consent always emerges within discrete political commu- nities. As such, the constituent parts of those communities must grant consent, exercise and enjoy their rights, and par- ticipate in the whole within the limitations circumscribed by their political boundaries and borders. His dramatic works thus help us reconsider contemporary attacks on the nation- state and illuminate the body politic as an essential means for bringing into being the preconditions and framework re- quired for healthy political life, including liberal democracy, to flourish. Keywords: Shakespeare, body politic, liberal democracy, sovereignty, constitutions, citizenship, nation-state T he plays and poetry of William Shakespeare af- ford the careful reader an education in political wisdom. Four decades after the initial publica- tion of and resistance to two interpretative essays on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and King Lear in the American Political Science Review, 1 this is no Bernard J. Dobski is an Associate Professor of Political Sci- ence at Assumption College, Worcester, MA. Dustin A. Gish is Lecturer in the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK. longer a controversial claim. Scholars open to the arguments made in these essays from the perspective of political philoso- phy about Shakespeare and the political wisdom embedded in his plays have assembled ever since then an impressive body of work—an effort that continues to bear fruit still today. 2 Shakespeare’s political wisdom contributes to the timeless character of his works; it also infuses them with a timeliness that informs our understanding of the pressing political is- sues not only of Elizabethan and Jacobean England but also of our own time as well. The articles in this Symposium by Joseph Alulis, Peter Meilaender, and Timothy Spiekerman are the heirs of and contributors to this interpretive tradition of Shakespeare’s works. 3 We argue, in our article, for the rel- evance of a contemporary return to Shakespeare because his work prompts thinking about the Body Politic, perhaps the most vivid and enduring image in speech describing political community ever proposed. Through his works, Shakespeare helps us to think about both parts and wholes in a political context and about the proper relationship between the parts and the whole. Indeed, there may be no greater account or anatomy of the Body Politic in the English language than what one discovers in Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. 4 THE POLITICAL CRISIS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY To speak of “the body politic” today tends to evoke in the minds of readers a particularly disquieting image of a rigidly hierarchical and unified community in which individ- ual parts are fully incorporated and rendered utterly subor- dinate to the interest of a totalitarian whole. It thus recalls the brutal authoritarian regimes of the last century whose appeals to nationalism derived from a view of the nation as an organic entity, one whose parts were wholly subordi- nate to and understood solely in terms of the success of the whole. The lingering legacy of their injustices in the present, combined with the utopian hope that such injustices can be overcome once and for all, has brought the political form of the nation-state under attack. The contemporary assault on 181 Downloaded by [University of Oklahoma Libraries] at 13:21 24 September 2012