Introduction: reframing political thought

Abstract

As we enter the twenty-first century, many of the conventional ways of analysing politics and power seem obsolescent. They were forged in the period when the boundaries of the nation state seemed to set the natural frame for political systems, and when geo-politics seemed inevitably to be conducted in terms of alliances and conflicts amongst national states. They took their model of political power from an idea of the state formed in nineteenth-century philosophical and constitutional discourse. This imagined a centralized body within any nation, a collective actor with a monopoly of the legitimate use of force in a demarcated territory. This apparent monopoly of force was presumed to underpin the unique capacity of the state to make general and binding laws and rules across its territory. It also seemed to imply that all other legitimate authority was implicitly or explicitly authorized by the power of the state. Such styles of thinking about political power also embodied particular ideas about the human beings who were the subjects of power. These were structured by the image of the individualized, autonomous and self-possessed political subject of right, will and agency. Political conceptions of human collectivities also tended to see them as singularities with identities which provided the basis for political interests and political actions: classes, races, orders, interest groups. Within such styles of thought, freedom was defined in essentially negative terms.