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Isaac Ariail Reed

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Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theoryandphilosophy  paypal.me/theoryphilosophy IG: @theory_and_philosophy In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Isaac Ariail Reed, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to discuss his most recent book, Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies. Here are some links to Dr. Reed's work: Power in Modernity: Agency relations and the creative destruction of the King’s two bodies  https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo48408506.html Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo11636599.html  “Deep culture in action: resignification, synecdoche, and metanarrative in the moral panic of the Salem Witch Trials” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-014-9241-4 Isaac Ariail Reed and Julia Adams, “Culture in Transitions to Modernity: Seven pillars of a new research agenda” https://sociology.yale.edu/sites/default/files/reed_adams_theory_and_society_2011_1.pdf 

Patreon: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/theoryandphilosophy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.patreon.com/theoryandphilosophy </a> <a href="http://paypal.me/theoryphilosophy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">paypal.me/theoryphilosophy</a> IG: @theory_and_philosophy In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Isaac Ariail Reed, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to discuss his most recent book, Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies. Here are some links to Dr. Reed's work: Power in Modernity: Agency relations and the creative destruction of the King’s two bodies <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo48408506.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo48408506.html</a> Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo11636599.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo11636599.html </a> “Deep culture in action: resignification, synecdoche, and metanarrative in the moral panic of the Salem Witch Trials” <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-014-9241-4" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-014-9241-4</a> Isaac Ariail Reed and Julia Adams, “Culture in Transitions to Modernity: Seven pillars of a new research agenda” <a href="https://sociology.yale.edu/sites/default/files/reed_adams_theory_and_society_2011_1.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://sociology.yale.edu/sites/default/files/reed_adams_theory_and_society_2011_1.pdf</a>

"Power in Modernity:" A Conversation with Dr. Isaac Ariail Reed

My guest is Isaac Ariail Reed. He's the author of Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies. In it he 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?

My guest is Isaac Ariail Reed. He's the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Power-Modernity-Relations-Creative-Destruction/dp/022668945X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=power+in+modernity+Isaac&amp;qid=1587237920&amp;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies.</a> In it he 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?

Episode 206: Power in Modernity, with Isaac Ariail Reed