The Sacrifice Law Workbench
This project has moved to the Political Pathology Workbench. This site remains published for reference and citation. New work, documentation updates, and publication artifacts will appear at PPW.
A comparative study of how political language makes nations, armies, and ideologies sacred—and how killing and dying are made meaningful in their name.
The question
To what degree do recurring metaphor systems in leader-centered political corpora support, complicate, or limit Koenigsberg’s Law of Sacrifice, its body-politic corollary, and the construction of enemies as bringers of death?
The expanded pre-v1 corpus is frozen at six cases and 41 manifest documents. The original four pilot cases have draft support scores; French Revolution and British World War I have annotation-forward artifacts but no promoted support ratings yet. These are provisional analytical results, not publication-ready findings: human reliability work, expanded reliability sampling, and publication-grade citations belong in PPW before any promotion.
The workbench tests the theory rather than assuming it. Similar metaphors do not establish moral equivalence: historical endpoint, enemy construction, institutional setting, and enacted violence remain decisive.
Choose a reading path
Quick overview
Meet the cases and see why they were selected.
Read the argument
Start with the provisional cross-case findings and their limits.
Audit the evidence
Inspect status, methods, provenance, validation, and claim traceability.
Comparative cases
American Revolution
Revolutionary founding, sacred liberty, collective obligation, and war.
Napoleon
Imperial glory, army–nation fusion, leader symbolism, and mobilization.
Lincoln
Union, covenant, battlefield sacrifice, providence, and reconciliation.
Hitler
Racial purification, enemy construction, extermination, and genocidal state violence.
French Revolution
Jacobin virtue, republican salvation, terror, and revolutionary sacrifice.
British World War I
Democratic wartime obligation, endurance, civilization, and sacrifice rhetoric.