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seeks to help continue the process of remembering these forgotten ancient histories for
Miami, Florida, and elsewhere” (p. 112). I have no doubt that it will succeed.
“The political” is a concept that was originally put forward by Carl Schmitt in the 1930s.
It is related to his concept of sovereignty (i.e., “the one who decides in the state of excep-
tion”) and refers to “the original instituting act of every political-institutional order”
(p. xvii). The notions of sovereignty and the political have had a postfascist theoretical
revival during the past few decades in the work of a number of philosophers and social
theorists, including Reinhart Koselleck, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancière, to
name a few, because of their utility for understanding contemporary violence, democ-
racy, cultural crisis, the state of exception, and the rule of law.
The author of the book under review, Elı́as Palti, is one of Latin America’s most
theoretical and philosophically oriented historians. In this short but expansive book, he
puts forward the idea that “the realm of the political is not a natural, transhistorical
entity” (p. xviii). Instead, Palti argues convincingly that the concept’s referent emerged as
an empirical reality in Europe during the seventeenth century, alongside the rise of
absolute monarchies.
Palti’s book studies the moment of inception of this new empirical and theological
reality and its development, transformation, and final dissolution over the course of four
centuries. The effort involves understanding both the political architecture of modern
regimes and the ways in which this architecture was figured. In this latter aspect, Palti is
faithful to the methods associated with the history of concepts set of approaches,
developed in different ways both by the Cambridge School and by Koselleck and his
school and since then significantly developed in what one might well be tempted to call
the Quilmes School of Intellectual History and its journal, Prismas.
An Archaeology of the Political is notable not only for its breathtaking scope and its
conceptual originality but also for the range of sources used, from political texts to a
detailed and sophisticated dialogue with figurative arts, dramatic performance, and even
music, and with a good ear for social historical questions thrown in. Palti’s dexterity in
moving between these genres—and over four centuries—is one source of pleasure in this
demanding and complex text.
Palti begins his archaeology of the political by tracing some of the implications of
the transformation of European monarchies, from feudal to corporatist forms. Specif-
ically, the author shows how the figure of the king develops as it becomes something
other than that of primus inter pares among aristocrats. Tracing the translation and
The translation into English of Luis Nicolau Parés’s The Formation of Candomblé comes
as welcome news. Even over a decade after its first publication in Portuguese in 2006, it