What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project. By Ann Hartle. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. 190p. $100.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

lynching, September 11, and the Black Lives Matter movement. While some of these events involve the deaths of many, others feature a single victim; and while two events took place in New York City others were located in Mississippi, Chicago, and beyond. What the case studies feature in common, however, is a set of shared themes: public grief, contested identities, shifting claims for responsibility, the conditions of possibility for meaningful response to loss, and, above all, the central importance of race to American political experience. That collective mourning can galvanize a politics has become all too clear in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, even if this “mournable moment” has, to date, failed to yield much change for the future. Pool argues that “calls for political change need not be successful to fulfill criteria of a politics of mourning” (p. 41). But why should some ordinary deaths lead to political transformation when others do not? Pool explains that different types of political mourning fall on a spectrum that spans from more democratic to more sovereign. Where “democratic mourning” seeks to foreground relations of equality between citizens, “sovereign mourning” seeks to a foreground the interests of the state. “Democratic mourning” is more likely to lead to political change than “sovereign mourning,” Pool argues, because “democratic mourning” facilitates a politics of inclusion and equality, whereas “sovereign mourning” generates the opposite impulse. The example Pool offers is September 11, a paradigm of “sovereign mourning.” In the wake of the Patriot Act, civil liberties were curtailed while the powers of the state were magnified. Moreover, Muslims were targeted as scapegoats, a symptom of the grief-wrath that shadows the sovereign anxiety for security and certainty. If the prospects for positive change turn on whether political mourning takes a democratic or sovereign shape in the aftermath of tragic loss, then Pool’s book could do more to identify why an event might give way to one or the other direction. “Much depends on who speaks for the dead and whether we listen to those affected or whether the meaning of the event is overtaken by other actors or speakers with agendas potentially unrelated to the event at hand” (p. 155). Indeed. But what accounts for whether and when this might happen? Should the vicissitudes of social media, so often cited as the source of pernicious polarization, account for whether political mourning trends democratic or sovereign? Or perhaps it is the deeper histories of racial exclusion that originate in our nation’s founding that explain the difference. Pool concludes that, “It might be that there are some foundationally undemocratic institutions that cannot be changed unless we literally re-form the polity” (p. 158). This provocative assertion leaves the reader wondering what may be worth hoping for. In the end, Political Mourning remains a profoundly hopeful book that urges us to view hope not as an attachment to a necessary outcome of collective action, but rather as an attunement to the world of possibilities such actions open up. In Pool’s terms, “Mournable moments present a democratic polity with an opportunity to reevaluate and lessen the gap between ideals and reality— moments when we recognize and embrace a political, collective responsibility to do better by our fellow citizens” (p. 26). So long as we invoke the names of the unjustly dead on behalf of a world where everyone’s death should matter, political mourning can convoke a vibrant democratic act of resilience. Political Mourning is a deeply insightful, impassioned, and often dazzling testament to this act.