Browse

In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a 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”—reformulating via cultural sociology classic theories of principal and agent—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, and 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. This leads to 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, he 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?

This book examines the characteristics of grassroots organizations that enable them to translate constituency action into political power. Extensive prior research shows that simply amassing the support of individuals—even large numbers of them—does not lead to durable change. Instead, the authors show that the strategic choices that organizational leaders make help explain how social movement actors are able to achieve their goals. Drawing on a multi-year, multi-method comparative case study of outlier cases where grassroots groups built power on issues ranging from immigrant rights to universal preschool, the book reveals the dynamism and uncertainty of political power shifts. In-depth case studies from Arizona, Kentucky, Nevada, Ohio, Minnesota, and Virginia show that the movement leaders whose organizations were able to shift power invested in building constituencies that shared several key characteristics: they were independent (not beholden to someone else’s assessment of their value in any given moment); committed (loyal to the organization); flexible (willing to shift as political circumstances changed); and populated by a distributed and relationally connected network of member-strategists. The book’s main contribution is to demonstrate how building constituency internally and exercising power externally operate in mutually reinforcing and transformative ways.