Concept
Homo sacer
Overview
Homo sacer (Latin for "the sacred man" or "the accursed man") is a figure of Roman law: a person who is banned and might be killed by anybody, but must not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes the concept as the starting point of his main work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words _profane_ and _sacred_ (_profane_, _sacré_). This division of the world into two domains, the one containing all…
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
States what Homo sacer is.
At the same time there has been arising a co-ordinate species of government--that of Religion. As all ancient records and traditions prove, the earliest rulers are regarded as divine personages. The maxims and commands they uttered during their lives are held sacred after their deaths, and are enforced by their divinely-descended successors; who in their turns are promoted to the pantheon of the race, there to be…
Herbert Spencer, Essays on education and kindred subjects
Close in meaning to Homo sacer; the term itself is not named.
Meanwhile, the religious control has been little by little separating itself from the civil, both in its essence and in its forms. While from the God-king of the savage have arisen in one direction, secular rulers who, age by age, have been losing the sacred attributes men ascribed to them; there has arisen in another direction, the conception of a deity, who, at first human in all things, has been gradually losing…
Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress
Close in meaning to Homo sacer; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Timeline of Western philosophers.