Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies

About the Book

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?

About the Author :
Isaac Ariail Reed is associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences and coeditor of Social Theory Now, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review :

"Isaac Reed's Power in Modernity is perhaps the most important social theory book published in a generation. . . It is ambitious, wide ranging, and offers a bold and innovative reading of what is arguably the discipline's foundational and central concept, namely, modernity and the modern. This is the sort of book that you want to read, re-read, mull over, argue, and grapple with."

-- "American Journal of Cultural Sociology" "Isaac Ariail Reed's Power in Modernity pursues three aims: it offers a new theory of power, it puts forward an explanation for a couple of key events in the Atlantic revolutions of the 18th century, and it provides a new description of modernity."-- "American Journal of Sociology" "Isaac Ariail Reed's Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies (2020) proposes a bold, imaginative thesis: modernity is characterized by the recurrent search for new figurations and myths that bind actors to those who command."
-- "Law and Society Review" "Part general social theory with a cultural bent, part historical interpretation of the modern condition and its origins, Isaac Ariail Reed's Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies is a work of extraordinary ambition... Highly original... This is a remarkable book. A range of scholars will find much to use, from social theorists to historical and political sociologists, to sociologists of culture, to students of empire in general and settler-colonial histories in particular."-- "British Journal of Sociology" "Power in Modernity is a startlingly original meditation on the meaning, morality, and madness of modern power. To explain the workings--and the violence--of 'chains of power, ' Reed evokes the traces of the medieval trope by which the sacred and enduring authority of the king's body politic overdetermined the king's profane and mortal body. Following the new template of power brought to life with the overthrow of the 'King's Two Bodies, ' Reed leads us on a journey--from the Salem witch trials to the Whiskey Rebellion, from the French Revolution to 'the edge of empire'--that leaves you breathless from the revelations and rebellions encountered along the way. In this unparalleled work of social theory, Reed has produced a masterpiece. But fair warning: Prepare to have your mind blown!"--Margaret R. Somers, University of Michigan