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My guest is Isaac Ariail Reed. He's the author of Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King\u2019s Two Bodies. In it he proposes a bold 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 \u201csending someone else to do something for you\u201d 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, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the \u201cKing\u2019s Two Bodies\u201d\u2014the monarch\u2019s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic\u2014as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed\u2019s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of \u201cthe people,\u201d as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity.

Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King\u2019s 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\u2019s own actions?