ABSTRACT
Modern frames and modern power The aim of this book is to trace the history of modern reflections of political community to a time when lo stato was being severed from a Christian eschatology, a time when political theorists – among them, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Ricardo, and J.S. Mill and a host of twentieth-century thinkers – sought ways of lending meaning and purpose to an emerging conception that has become fashionable to call “the political.” By that term I mean some account of what is integrative and purposive to a common political experience. Legitimacy is central to the meaning and purpose of differing conceptions of an integrative politics and the political forms it would realize as community. Probing some of the forms of legitimacy that modern theorists have furnished involves questioning the function of political ideals that were thought possible, ideals that have come to form the liberal political imagination.
