Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies - Softcover

Reed, Isaac Ariail

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022668945X ISBN 13: 9780226689456

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2020

Synopsis

In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination. Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money.

He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity.

Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

About this title

About the Author

Isaac Ariail Reed is professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia. In addition to Power in Modernity, he is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences, and the co-editor of Social Theory Now.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022668945X
• ISBN 13: 9780226689456
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 282