Big Brother and the Grim Reaper: Political Life After Death

States are thought only to exercise power over the land of the living. Benjamin Ginsberg argues otherwise, exploring the state’s reach into the realm of the Grim Reaper, bureaucratizing death to strengthen the state’s hold on life. He notes that increasingly institutions are using the regulation of death as an essential source of power. They do this by not only threatening death to their enemies but also securing loyalty and obedience by extending citizens’ lives and promising to effectuate the postmortem fulfillment of citizens’ antemortem desires. The state treats the loyal dead with respect, sometimes offering them a place in the secular afterlife of honor and memory, while consigning the faithless to the void.

Benjamin Ginsberg is David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than thirty books, including The Fall of the Faculty, Presidential Government, Downsizing Democracy, The Captive Public: Politics by Other Means, The Value of Violence, How the Jews Defeated Hitler, America’s State Governments, What Washington Gets Wrong, and Warping Time. His college text, We the People, has been the nation’s most frequently used American government text for the past three decades. Ginsberg received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1973 and was professor of government at Cornell until 1992, when he joined the Johns Hopkins faculty.