Description:
Revitalising the concept of 'authority' to understand power in its complexity, this volume provides a powerful analysis of the ways that relationships of trust, attachment, governance and inequality become possible when subjectivities and bodies are invested in the life of power. Themes include biopolitical authority, community, aesthetics, experimentation and the political.
This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Political Power.
Review Quotes:
In the literature on power there has been a tendency to interpret power as domination, thus the opposite of authority. In this important collection of articles the authors challenge this viewpoint, arguing that power and authority structure everyday life in a mutually constitutive manner. Power and authority become an ontological category, which defines our being-in-the-social-world. As such, this collection makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates in social theory. - Mark Haugaard, Professor of Politics and Sociology, National University of Ireland.
To understand power you must also grasp the problematic and productive dimensions of authority. Seeing authority as both cultural imperatives people are called upon to obey or resist, and as a set of passive syntheses through which our modes of perception and prejudgment are organized, the authors in this volume call on us to work upon those aspects that have been most ignored in the literature and politics of authority. A rich and provocative set of essays. - William E. Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
An original and inspiring set of reflections that raises important questions and opens up debates on 'positive power', authority, and community. - Kate Nash, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London.