An Archaeology of the Political : : Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present / / Elías Palti.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2017
• VerfasserIn: Palti, Elías,
• MitwirkendeR: Howard, Dick,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2017]; ©2017
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Language: English
• Series: Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.) :; 6 b&w photographs and 4 figures

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Series Editor's Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: A Conceptual History of the Political- The Archaeological Project -- 1. The Theological Genesis of the Political -- 2. The Tragic Scene -- 3. The Discourse of Emancipation and the Emergence of Democracy as a Problem -- 4. The Rebirth of the Tragic Scene and the Emergence of the Political as a Conceptual Problem -- Conclusion: The End of a Long Cycle- The Second Disenchantment of the World -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index