Birth of the State: The Place of the Body in Crafting Modern Politics

Description

This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted ideas about the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other since their original crafting in the seventeenth century. Considering multiple sites of theory and practice, Charlotte Epstein analyses the fundamental rights to security, liberty, and property respectively as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed. Acknowledgments A Note on References 1. Introduction 2. The Corporeal Ontology of Modern Security 3. Denaturalising Security 4. From Liberties to Liberty: Crafting Territory and the Law with the Body 5. Externalising and Internalising Liberty via Discipline 6. Privatising Property 7. The Public Anatomy Lesson Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index