About the Book
This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted ideas about the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers two revolutions. The first, scientific, threw humanity out of the centre of the universe, and transformed the very meanings of matter, space, and the body; while the second, legal and political, re-established humans as the centre-point of the framework of modern rights. The book analyses the fundamental rights to security, liberty, and property respectively as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed. It develops three arguments, that the body served to naturalise security; to individualise liberty; and to privatise property. Covering a wide range of materials--from early modern Dutch painting, to the canon of English political thought, the Anglo-Scottish legal struggles of naturalization, and medical and religious practices--it shows both how the body has operated as history's great naturaliser, and how it can be mobilised instead as a critical tool that lays bare the deeply racialised and gendered constructions that made the state and the subject of rights. The book returns to the origins of constructivist and constitutive theorising to reclaim their radical and critical potential.
About the Author :
Charlotte Epstein is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney.
Review :
"In her clear and brilliant book, Epstein achieves two conceptual revolutions: to envisage the modern State and the subject of rights as a single relation, and to define this relation as a construction of bodies. This is an entirely original combination, from which she derives remarkable understandings. This is a must-read for every scholar in the field, and any contemporary who wonders where our States and our embodied rights are heading."--Etienne Balibar, author of Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology
"At once, a markedly original interpretation of Hobbes and Locke and a brilliant genealogy of the human that foregrounds the mutual constitution of bodies, rights-bearing subjects, and the state in modernity, Charlotte Epstein provides an erudite account and an impressive critique of our most taken-for-granted concepts--individuality, security, agency, liberty, property--and the political relations they enable and constrain."--Mary Hawkesworth, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
"Charlotte Epstein has produced a defining work of scholarship in critical International Relations. I can think of no other scholar who could navigate with such rigour and originality the genealogy of the modern state and the subject of rights using the body as the defining lens. This is no neutral body however, but one that is constituted, in all its gendered and racialized forms, at the intersection of the epistemological, juridical, and political discourses of modernity. We continue to witness the implications to our present day."--Vivienne Jabri, King's College London
"Recent political work on gender and race has made the body in the body politic more central than ever before. But how should we conceptualize their relationship? In this fascinating intervention in the debate, Charlotte Epstein argues that we need to go back to 17th century Europe and recognize the co-constitution of the modern subject and the modern state. Anyone writing about these issues from now on will have to engage with this formidable and brilliantly conceived book."--Charles W. Mills, The Graduate Center, CUNY
"Birth of the State is an original and simply outstanding reconstruction of the emergence of the language of the modern state and the embodied subject of security, liberty, and property in the seventeenth century. This scholarly work on the major theorists from Grotius through Hobbes to Locke is indispensable for historians of political thought. It is just as important for contemporary political theorists to understand how this seemingly common sense web of concepts was crafted in the first place, cultivate a careful and critical distance from it, and perhaps think beyond it."--James Tully, University of Victoria
"States routinely inscribe their authority upon the bodies of citizen subjects, but only because states and subjects have already constructed each other through historical transformations in what it has meant to be a body. Charlotte Epstein traces these transformations through early-modern European understandings of nature, matter, temporality, spatiality, security, liberty, and property. In her wonderfully incisive and provocative analysis, the political lives of bodies finally come in from the cold."--R.B.J Walker, University of Victoria, Canada, and PUC-Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
