Exemplarity and Singularity

This book identifies and follows a strand in the history of thought – ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations – that uses particulars, and more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the strand of thought followed here finds its home, if not its origin, in Rome. The practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law, genres that also secured its transmission. Tracing the role of exemplarity from Rome through to its influence on literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and law, it shows how Roman exemplarity has subsisted, not only as a figure of thought, but also as an alternative way to organize and to transmit knowledge.