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

Inhaltsangabe

In <i>Power in Modernity</i>, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination. &#160;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 &#8220;sending someone else to do something for you&#8221; as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money.<br><br> 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 &#8220;King&#8217;s Two Bodies&#8221;&#8212;the monarch&#8217;s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic&#8212;as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed&#8217;s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of &#8220;the people,&#8221; as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity.<br><br> Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King&#8217;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&#8217;s own actions?

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