Attending to the tropological imagination of Progressive Era U.S. immigration, this chapter maps what Michel Foucault calls “the organization of ‘erotic zones’ in the social body” to narrate a queer history of the social body itself. In so doing, the chapter animates a variety of period figurations of mass immigration—including racial indigestion and race suicide—to trace a new genealogy of the literary erotics of Asian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, the ethnic groups that most threatened the whiteness of the social body. Reading across representations of immigration in the works of Henry James, Israel Zangwill, Charles Warren Stoddard, Yone Noguchi, Sui Sin Far, Jennie June, Emanuel Carnevali, and Emma Lazarus, this chapter shifts the history of sexuality from one located in individual bodies to theorize a sexuality of the population.

Chapter 2 considers how Cicero responded to the model of the body politic proposed by Catiline. Rejecting the head of state metaphor, his oratory describes a civic healer capable of diagnosing and curing the ills of the Republic. This idea drew upon a well-established moralizing tradition that identified vice as a contagion that had infected the res publica. Whereas Varro, Sallust, and Lucretius employed such imagery to indict Rome’s governing class for its ambitio and avaritia, Cicero used it to justify the extralegal execution of the Catilinarian conspirators. Although he sought to protect a constitution under threat, his medically inspired language helped legitimize violence as a tool of political engagement. Identifying Clodius and his allies as new malignancies in need of amputation, he contributed to a corrosive cycle of civic conflict that culminated in Pompey’s sole consulship and Caesar’s dictatorship, two constitutional innovations justified as curative remedies. In the end, his rhetoric proved susceptible to appropriation by those less invested in collegial governance than he.

The Introduction presents the main questions and aims of the book. I argue that Roman thinkers used the metaphor of the body politic to articulate competing visions of the res publica between the Catilinarian Conspiracy and Year of the Four Emperors. I frame my discussion in relation to the Cambridge School of intellectual history, which has catalyzed the revival of interest in classical republicanism. In contrast to its focus on questions of liberty and popular sovereignty, my book turns towards problems of statesmanship and constitutional transformation. It asks how a foundational metaphor of civic organization evolved in response to the establishment of autocracy. It foregrounds the importance of metaphor as an avenue of political thought.

In describing the significance of the idea of popular sovereignty, Tocqueville alluded to its theological properties, indicating that its power relies at least in part on belief. Edmund S. Morgan declared, The success of government [...] requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not. I trace the long lineage of these observations, focusing mainly on three formative moments. The first is Platos Republic, in which Socrates anticipates reason of state, by allowing rulers to lie, to protect the state. The second is Hobbess appeal to consider society as though it had emerged from a social contract, which shaped modern political thought from the seventeenth century to the present. The third is Rousseaus observation that the legislators work involves an undertaking that transcends human capacities and, to execute it, an authority that is nil, a problem that he proposed to solve by means of a civil religion. The continuing relevance of these observations not only poses important challenges, but also presents opportunities, for popular sovereignty.

Charles V’s early death endangered the monarchical system he created, because his adolescent son faced massive urban rebellions, focused on the unpopular indirect taxes Charles V had created. Not long after the monarchy surmounted that challenge, Charles VI’s descent into madness led to a civil war between the Orléans and Burgundy branches of the family. The civil war necessitated a renewed series of theoretical justifications for monarchical power. The concurrent debates about papal v. conciliar supremacy had particular resonance in France because of Jean Gerson’s key role both in French political life and in the debates within the Church.Writers such as Jean de Terrevermeille, who transformed the “Salic Law” from a rarely cited myth into a largely accepted “fundamental law,” and Christine de Pizan, who created an explicitly French metaphor of the body politic, would have a determining influence on the next two centuries of French political discourse. The political prominence of multiple women placed gender at the center of French politics in this period, a pattern that repeated in the transition to the new vocabulary of State, after 1560.

Chapter 1 examines demographic ideas in early Tudor England, centering on connections between the mobility and mutability of particular groups of people. It first delineates sources for demographic ideas, in particular the Bible and Aristotle’s Politics, and emphasizes the centrality of qualitative concerns about multitudes of people as a factor in the health of the polis. It then turns to a major context for English demographic thought, the enclosure of land from the late fifteenth century. It delineates a key theme in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature of agrarian complaint, detailed in More’s Utopia: causal links between enclosure and depopulation (the removal of a functional multitude from a specific locale) and between mobility and degeneration (here, of ploughmen displaced by enclosure into criminals). The final section looks at the development – in Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Common Weal, and an anonymous set of “Polices” – of an idea of policy centered on restricting mobility to prevent degeneration and maintain proportions and relations between functional multitudes as components of the body politic.

The Conclusion contextualizes the argument for a posthumanism mode of being argued for in this book in light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic and especially how the framework of biocapital can help us to understand the racialized economic equality upon which Western democracies rely – systemic injustice made all the more visible by the effects of the pandemic. Working through Roberto Esposito’s critique of the concept of personhood as it has unfolded in Western political theory, and how we might think through his notion of immunitary biopolitics in relation to this global situation, as well as drawing on new work on immunity that requires us to reject previous metaphorical figurations of the immune system in military terms of borders and purity, I show how his critique of personhood aligns with the arguments for posthumanist politics made throughout this book. Both share a critique of rights-based frameworks for ethics and suggest the urgent need for new figurations, new ontologies, new ethics. The book concludes by suggesting that “normal” is not a state to which we should desire to return but that instead the failure of existing systems in the face of the pandemic calls for a renewal of our political imagination through posthumanist theory.

Chapter 2 introduces selections from Aristotle, Polybius, William Blackstone, and Edmund Burke, and lays out the basic tenets of classical republicanism. By focusing on the “res-publica”, the common good, republicanism embraces a corporatist and organic vision of both the people and the state. The political community is envisioned as a human body, suggesting that the body politic grows naturally; each organ or member contributes a different task and the health of the whole depends on the well-being of each member. Moreover, republican theorists suggest the need to adapt political institutions to the character and changing circumstances of the people. Selections from Aristotle focus on the organic origin of the political community and on the mixed regime. Polybius introduces the idea of checks-and-balances and the importance of religious beliefs for the stability of the political order. Blackstone and Burke tried to accommodate some of the new liberal ideas in their theoretical framework, attempting to reconcile theoretically opposed visions—an approach that would prove particularly popular during the American founding.

This chapter analyses the complex social position of the duke of Brittany as presented in the legal arguments for Jeanne’s succession in 1341, a document which has been completely overlooked by modern historians. It argues that the debate centred around the ambiguity of the ducal rank: did the duke legally have more in common with the nobles of Brittany than with the kings of France? In this framework there were two communities (to use the modern terminology) or bodies politic (the medieval) to which the duke could conceivably belong and where their primary responsibilities lay. While this was a learned view constructed for immediate advantage, the case reflected wider contemporary difficulties with parsing the internal stratification of the nobility and the inherent tension within the ducal role as a subordinate sovereign. These challenges were exacerbated because standards of divided succession influenced contemporary interpretations of status, overlaying questions of shared lordship over the different hierarchical layers. The blurring of these lines challenges the historiographical prioritization of the competitive centralization of power through the strict demarcation of ruler and ruled in the later Middle Ages.

This chapter seeks to locate George IV’s fleeting visit to Edinburgh in what cultural historian Peter de Bolla has described as the domain of the scopic. It does so by focusing on the visual culture of the visit as witnessed in the production of images – both official and unofficial – by various artists, including David Wilkie, John Wilson Ewbank and William Home Lizars. This chapter argues that a multiplicity of visual experiences was proffered by the king’s visit to Edinburgh. Not only in the production of traditional art historical media like paintings, engravings and sculpture, but also in the ways in which the city itself in terms of its body politic, its architectural embellishments (‘the Athens of the North’) and its topographical landscape were described as being displayed to the kKing in a sequence of staged tableaux. He, in turn, is described as being revealed to the gawping gaze of his Scottish subjects.