Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King s Two Bodies (Paperback)

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?