Since the early 1980s, actor-network theory has contested the status of “context” as an explanatory resource. Expressions and concepts such as “transformations of social worlds,” “enactments,” and “ontological politics” provide resources for grasping the ways in which agents actively transform the world and add something new. This has been of immense importance and serves as a warning against reducing events and actors to a given context. But a side effect of this forward looking move is that not enough attention is (...) given to that which enables issues and situations to emerge in the first place. Moreover, the focus on that which is constantly being enacted seems to have privileged the contemporary as the object of study and ethnography as the method of inquiry. History and the study of texts—from the past—seem, increasingly, to get lost in Science and Technology Studies. The aim of this article is instead to use actor-network theory resources as a historicizing method. The article explores the tense concern for the animal in political debates at the turn of the twentieth century. The article argues that contexts should not be seen as something external, but rather integral to the relevant text and situation, thus the very issue at stake. (shrink)

El artículo se propone analizar la perspectiva que aparece sobre el concepto de “Estado” en las obras del pensador piamontés del siglo XVI Giovanni Botero. Se estudiará especialmente su conceptualización sobre la idea de “razón de Estado”, junto a ciertos tratamientos sobre los problemas de la imposición del orden, la relación de la política con otras disciplinas, la guerra y los ejércitos. El objetivo será entrever si en este publicista tan leído en su época se pueden apreciar los procesos que (...) la teoría política asocia a la formación del Estado Moderno Soberano o si se vislumbran desarrollos que no congenian necesariamente con la supuesta consolidación ineludible de esta entidad política, brindando de esta manera una perspectiva distinta sobre las ideas que dieron origen a varios de los conceptos y procesos políticos de la Modernidad. This article analyzes the perspective around the concept of “State” along the work of the sixteenth–century Piedmontese thinker Giovanni Botero. The task will be centered specially around his conceptualization of the idea of “reason of State”, together with the treatment of issues related to the imposition of order, the relationship between politics and other disciplines, the study of war and armies. The article aims at studying if in this political thinker, who attained an important fame at his time, some of the processes that modern political theory links to the formation of Modern Sovereign State can be seen, or if developments that do not necessarily merge with the supposed unavoidable consolidation of that political entity can be discerned, bringing in this way a different perspective around the ideas which gave rise to many of modern political concepts and processes. (shrink)

This is a book of interpretation, not of fact. It studies the major discourses in African political thought throughout the last one and a half centuries, rendering new interpretations of a number of important theorists. Subsequently, this book analyzes paradigmatic models of thought that recur in pre-colonial, colonial, as well as post-colonial political discourses. This in depth analysis allows for a critical inventory of African political thought at the close of the twentieth century.