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?
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