An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780231179935)

In the past few decades, much political-philosophical reflection has been dedicated to the realm of "the political." Many of the key figures in contemporary political theory--Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Reinhart Koselleck, Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, among others--have dedicated themselves to explaining power relations, but in many cases they take the concept of the political for granted, as if it were a given, an eternal essence.

In An Archaeology of the Political, Elías José Palti argues that the dimension of reality known as the political is not a natural, transhistorical entity. Instead, he claims that the horizon of the political arose in the context of a series of changes that affirmed the power of absolute monarchies in seventeenth-century Europe and was successively reconfigured from this period up to the present. Palti traces this series of redefinitions accompanying alterations in regimes of power, thus describing a genealogy of the concept of the political. Perhaps most important, An Archaeology of the Political brings to theoretical discussions a sound historical perspective, illuminating the complex influences of both theology and secularization on our understanding of the political in the contemporary world.

Author: Elías Palti
ISBN-10: 0231179936
ISBN-13: 9780231179935
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/12/2020
Pages: 264
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.70h x 5.60w x 0.70d