Read more
In An Archaeology of the Political, Elías José Palti argues that the realm of 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 the regimes of power, creating a genealogy of the concept of the political. Perhaps most important, An Archaeology of the Political demonstrates that transposing ideas from one historical context into another invariably inflicts violence on the conceptual framework from which all political ideas take their meanings.
About the author
Elías José Palti is principal researcher for the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Argentina), a professor at both the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes and the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, and the director of the Center for Intellectual History at the National University of Quilmes. He is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of ten books in Spanish and many articles in different languages. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Ideas and Prismas. Revista de Historia Intelectual.
Summary
A historical-conceptual perspective on the concept of "the political"
Report
"This is a key book that fills significant gaps in the scholarship of the long conceptual history of the political." Federico Finchelstein, The New School for Social Research
