142 HAHR / February

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.

david arbesú, University of South Florida

doi 10.1215/00182168-7288050

An Archaeology ofthe Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century

to the Present. By elı́as josé palti. Columbia Studies in Political Thought /
Political History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Figures. Tables.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xx, 235 pp. Cloth, $60.00.

“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

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 Book Reviews / Longue Durée 143

dissemination of Aristotle’s treatise on politics by Thomas Aquinas and subsequent

development in Dante, Palti argues that “the figure of the monarch thus emerges as
occupying a singular place, as ‘a part that is not a part,’ but at the same time as the
incarnation of the whole, a ‘third entity’ at once internal and external to society” (p. 9). It
is this externality, this twin figure of transcendence and immanence with regard to the
community, that becomes key to the political as a reality that can be empirically described
and historically tracked.
The author subsequently turns to the conceptual and cultural implications of the
movement from feudal to national monarchies, a transformation that he identifies with
the passage from Renaissance to baroque monarchies. Certainly one of the most sig-
nificant contributions of this book from the viewpoint of Latin Americanist historians is
Palti’s insistence on the baroque as a turning point in the consolidation of the political, in
regard to both its organizational and its representational dimensions. Indeed, Palti’s book
places Spanish and Spanish American history at the center of the development of the
political, and in this way he also situates the Iberian and Ibero-American world at the very
center of the kind of genealogy that Michel Foucault first developed, in his discussion of
the movement from the age of representation to the age of history and beyond.
Palti walks us through these developments by way of close discussions of works of
literature, painting, theater, and philosophy: from El Greco’s painting of the burial of the
conde de Orgaz to Baltasar Gracián’s El criticón and the political philosophy of Francisco
Suárez. This kind of polyphonic approach to political theology is demanding for his-
torians even for one single period, and yet in this short book it is sustained through the
transformations of the political as an idea that transcends the political community into
the history of culture in the twentieth century, where, through a close discussion of key
moves in modern art, Palti concludes with a deliberation on the “second disenchantment
of the world.” In the process, the author implicitly places contemporary discussions of
secularism and religious revival in a new light, emphasizing that there is currently no
easily conceived solution to the problem of political transcendence and immanence. We
can, however, “trace the trajectory that has led us to” these questions and, from that
vantage point, think critically about the political and cultural crisis of the present (p. 180).
Such is the sweep of this extraordinary work.

claudio lomnitz, Columbia University

doi 10.1215/00182168-7288061

The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil.

By luis nicolau parés. Translated by richard vernon in collaboration
with the author. Latin America in Translation / en Traducción / em Tradução.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Photographs. Illustrations.
Maps. Tables. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xx, 398 pp. Paper, $37.50.

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

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