Resisting the Revenge of the Romantic Hegel: a Reply to Werner Binder’s Essay on Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)

Abstract

How does one thank a writer whose understanding of one's own book runs deep, whose perspicacity is undeniable, and whose disagreements are of such consequence? Only by engaging in debate, I think. Werner Binder grasps what is at stake in Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies, and he has issued a challenge that rests on two pillars: a Hegelian political philosophy of recognition and reason in modernity, and a Durkheimian account of egalitarian (or proto-egalitarian) bonds of solidarity. Atop these two pillars Binder artfully entablatures, as both a counterpoint to and re-articulation of the theory of power I am developing, an account of impersonal egalitarianism as not simply a modern possibility, but rather modernity's essential dynamic or even telos. Binder's careful reply operates in both an analytic and a normative register, and as such articulates in its criticisms one of the central enthusiastic pretensions of Power in Modernity. Throughout the book, and especially in its last chapter, I consider a set of intellectual problems and projects that are held in common by sociological theory and political philosophy-though not without tension and ambivalence. These complexities perhaps explain why his review can be both a sympathetic reconstruction of my book-notable in its hermeneutic charity-and yet also an outline for a social and political theory that is quite different from my own. Binder accepts the theoretical terms of art developed in part I-rector, actor, other, and project. He also finds convincing my rendering of chains of power and their representation in seventeenth-and eighteenth

Book Review: Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State

“…It reveals how, despite all their strategizing, Anderson's reformers crucially depended on their audience and the ways in which they successfully and credibly achieved to be seen as “acting on behalf” of the nation, the economy, the moral order, and finally, the children that these regulations are ultimately about. Her insights into the cultural contingency of performance may, in fact, be further elaborated theoretically—they seem to fit quite well with Isaac Reed's (2020) recent analysis of the ideational and relational sources of modern state power.…”