Introduction
chapter 1, Oxford University Press, (2021)Birth of the State.DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190917623.001.0001
Abstract
This introduction discusses the wide spectrum of approaches concerned with analysing processes of social construction, broadly known as ‘constructivism’. It is interested not merely in ‘the construction of’, but properly in the ‘constitution’ of the modern political, and in how this implicates a specific form of creative political agency. The variant of radical constructivism developed in this book is termed ‘constitutive constructivism’. The chapter then elucidates the book’s recourse to the body as an optic and situates it in relation to other somatic enquiries. It explains the different ways in which the body features in the book. The book considers the body as a catalytic object of modern science, as the privileged organ of this new knowledge, and as a crucial historical vehicle for the work of naturalisation. It also distinguishes between ‘the body’ in the singular and multiple ‘bodies’. The chapter shows where the body-as-optic maps onto feminist theories of embodiment and the works of Michel Foucault. Finally, it presents three key themes running throughout the book that help circumscribe the specific juncture of the scientific and the political the book explores. These are, first, the passage from a medieval-Aristotelian notion of ‘place’ to the modern concept of ‘space’, via the new understanding of ‘motion’; second, the early modern scientific problematization of difference and identity and how it played political questions of hierarchy and equality; third, the varieties of forms of reason that were taking shape in the midst of the scientific revolution, and their relations to both the early modern practice of ‘critique’ and to the question of authority.