The Naturalization of Domination and Legitimate Power in Classical Political Theory

• Published in: Estudos feministas 2003-01, Vol.11 (1), p.171-193
• Main Author: Varikas, Eleni
• Format: Article
• Language: por ; spa
• Subjects: ciência e autoridade; Dominance; hierarquia dos sexos; Legitimation; legitimação da dominação; modernidade política, naturalização do gênero; Modernity; natureza; Political Science Theories; Political Theories; Power; Religion Politics Relationship; religião e política; Sexual Inequality
• ISSN: 0104-026X; 1806-9584

The reflection developed here deals with one of the greatest political paradoxes of modern political thought: the turning of a political community into a human artifact while basing it on premises that are pre-political & therefore precede human action. As it reinvented the political as a free space, modernity reinvented the natural as a limit to this human freedom which religion could no longer contain. In such a context, the witch-hunt is a result both of a religious or superstitious obscurantism & of a rational enterprise based on efficacy. The political implications of cognitive polytheism, which explode in the plurality of scientific perceptions on human nature & on the nature of things, establish a close connection between the authority of modern "science" as a model for the knowledge of nature & that of a religious & temporal kind. The naturalization of the sexual hierarchy in the modern world is at the same time the archetype & the manifestation of this historical process that dislocates the legitimation of domination from the religious to the natural realm. 37 References. Adapted from the source document.