States of war [electronic resource] : Enlightenment origins of the political / David William Bates.
Bates, David William.
2012
JC171 .B38 2012eb
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Title States of war [electronic resource] : Enlightenment origins of the political / David William Bates.
Author Bates, David William.
ISBN 9780231528665 (electronic bk.)
9780231158046
9780231158053 (pbk.)
Imprint New York : Columbia University Press, c2012.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (xvii, 256 p.)
Call Number JC171 .B38 2012eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 320.109/033
Summary 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 beginnings of political community, Bates reclaims the idea of law, warfare, and the social order as intertwining elements subject to complex historical development. Following an analysis of seminal works by seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, Bates reviews the major canonical thinkers of constitutional theory (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau) from the perspective of existential security and sovereign power. Countering Carl Schmitt's influential notion of the autonomy of the political, Bates demonstrates that Enlightenment thinkers understood the autonomous political sphere as a space of law protecting individuals according to their political status, not as mere members of a historically contingent social order. -- Book Description.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Series Columbia studies in political thought/political history
Available in Other Form States of war.
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Machine generated contents note: Constitutional Violence and Enlightenment Thought
Why Enlightenment? On Law and the Origins of the Political
The Concept of the Political and the Constitutional State
ch. 1 The Autonomous State and the Origin of the Political
States of Law
The Instrumental State
Reason of State and the Origins of Legitimacy
ch. 2 States of Reasoning: Modern Natural-Law Theory
Disembodied Reason and the Nature of Sovereignty in Grotius
Hobbes's Political Robotics
Pufendorf's Concept of the Social
ch. 3 Locke's Natural History of the Political
Why Prerogative?
Sovereign Decision and the State of Law
Nature, War, and the Nature of War
A Natural History of the Political
Law in the Postpolitical Age
A Political-Legal State
A Political Community
ch. 4 Systems of Sovereignty in Montesquieu
Two Montesquieus
The State of War
The Political After War: Systems of Order
States in War
Exceptional States
Technologies of Balance
ch. 5 Rousseau's Cybernetic Political Body
Rousseau and the Political
The End of Natural Law
Humans In (and Out of) Nature
Political Cybernetics
Political Bodies at War
Rousseau and the Modern State
CONCLUSION
From the Concept of the Political to the Rule of Law.

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