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States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (Columbia Studies in Political Thought by David William Bates is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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We fear that the growing threat of violent attack has upset the balance between existential concepts of political power, which emphasize security, and traditional notions of constitutional limits meant to protect civil liberties. We worry that constitutional states cannot, during a time of war, terror, and extreme crisis, maintain legality and preserve civil rights and freedoms. David Williams Bates allays these concerns by revisiting the theoretical origins of the modern constitutional state, which, he argues, recognized and made room for tensions among law, war, and the social order. We traditionally associate the Enlightenment with the taming of absolutist sovereign power through the establishment of a legal state based on the rights of individuals. In his critical rereading, Bates shows instead that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of political autonomy in a systematic, theoretical way. Focusing on the nature of foundational violence, war, and existential crises, eighteenth-century thinkers understood law and constitutional order not as constraints on political power but as the logical implication of that primordial force. Returning to the origin stories that informed the begin

Who reads States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (Columbia Studies in Political Thought?

Author

David William Bates

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published

2012

Language

EN

ISBN

9780231158053

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Philosophy, Political Science