ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters, I have prepared my ground by offering a synopsis of the historical emergence and consolidation-through a secular process of severance and polarization-of the paired ontological conceptions of property and sovereignty and the master sciences which they animate. I now proceed to analyse their survival, and that of the dialectic of reduction to which they have jointly given rise, in some major debates and traditions in modern social and political thought. For this purpose, the survey chart of modern social and political theory might be redrawn by crossing two dichotomies. The first one distinguishes the tradition of power theory from that of property theory (or the master narrative of politics and domination from that of production and exploitation), while a second, transversal one marks off empirical and explanatory social ‘science’ from normatively committed political ‘ideology’. The resulting fourfold classification repartitions the field of the grand narratives as given in Table 2.
