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::: two ::: Dueling for Equality The Master’s Tools Will Take Down the Master’s House Meanwhile, back on the ranch, you can’t always wait till the cows come home: Whatever hopes for the future educational reforms carried, they involved a de‹nite delay. Also, the reformers focused on the ‹rst part of the autonomy/dignity equation. The question of a person’s worth—dignity is a kind of worth, as the German Würde for both suggests —is different, if even related, question. This chapter directly addresses the question of worth and focuses on a very different social practice: dueling. The political changes that emerged as a result of political and theoretical debates weren’t much more immediate than the outcomes of educational reforms, but the actual political dynamics in dueling were more direct: they weren’t about the future generations but were about the actors themselves. One history of Western politics has it that under modernity, equal dignity has replaced positional honor as the ground on which individuals ’ political status rests.1 Now, the story goes, the dignity which I have by virtue of nothing more than my humanity gives me both standing as a citizen vis-à-vis the state and a claim to respect from others. Earlier , my political status would have depended ‹rst on who I was (more respect for the well-born, less for the lower orders) as well as on how well I acquitted myself as that sort of person. In rough outline, the story is correct, but it has important complications. One of the most important of them is that aristocratic social practices and values themselves get used to ground and shape modernity. This chapter explores one such mechanism and its consequences. Dueling was one of the key practices in a culture of honor throughout the Western world: it was a means by which claims of 51 honor were made, maintained, and understood. It emerged out of medieval “trial by combat” in the sixteenth century and was, despite some regional variation, a common phenomenon in Europe and North America until the nineteenth century.2 Although dueling has been obsolete long enough to strike many of us a patently irrational, it took a long time to fade away; its story is one of slow decline, with odd bumps along the way. The contours of its fading capture an important aspect in the transition to modernity—that is, how the aristocratic conception of masculine honor can be deployed in a politics of equal dignity and how that deployment affects the conceptions of equal dignity. Two things about dueling make this possible. First, the practice distributes respect; second, dueling is necessarily an extralegal practice—that is, one that is outside the direct regulation of the state. This combination allows people to make claims to equality as individuals . That is the main argument of this chapter. But because the honor in dueling is masculine honor, presupposing a subordinate feminine honor that the masculine defends, it gives content to equal dignity in a way that forecloses, at least contingently, claims of gender equality. These are not independent of one another: many people in transitional moments want to preserve at the same time that they reinterpret some of the aristocratic values, in part because they worry about the ways some conceptions of equal dignity threaten what from their perspective is an ordered and meaningful universe. This chapter illuminates one important mechanism in the shift from premodern, aristocratic value system to a modern one, focusing on the role of dueling in that transition. Social theorists, I argue, played a role in that transition; I continue to focus here on Kant, whose treatment of dueling not only helps us understand it as an intelligible practice in its own right but also offers a reinterpretation that makes the practice compatible with the modern value of equal dignity. This is because Kant’s conception of a person requires that for someone to have dignity in social life, he must respond to challenges to that dignity, and the relationship of social equality that dueling involves provides a model for this theory. I begin by describing dueling during the long transition between the decline of aristocracy and modernity. I then zero in on what I call the moral economy of dueling, doing so largely through Kant’s eyes. Kant believes that some aristocratic values embedded in social hierar52 ::: The Playing Fields of Eton [3.141.41.187] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 23:49 GMT...

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