Power and Secularization

This book offers a geneaological understanding of the condition of our time by reconstructing the complex story of the transition from the "cyclical time" of the classic era to the "linear and infuturant time" of the modern world. Time is therefore understood not as a simple vector, but as a trans-political form par excellence, which involves the fundamental philosophical and political categories of the modern constellation: beginning with the concepts of progress, revolution, liberation, and alternative.Arguing that the process of secularization (in its broadest sense) is dependent on the modern notion of cumulative and irreversible time—together with the temporalization of history—Power and Secularization constitutes a conceptual history that will appeal to scholars of social and political theory and philosophy with interests in intellectual history and the genealogical method.

Giacomo Marramao is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Roma Tre University, Italy. He is also a member of the Honor Committee of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, France, and has been the recipient of numerous academic awards. His research explores theoretical and political philosophy, with particular emphasis on questions of power, hegemony, modernity, and time. He is the author of numerous books, several of which have been translated into various languages, including The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State (2012), Against Power: For an Overhaul of Critical Theory (2016), The Bewitched World of Capital: Methods, Theory, Politics (2023), and Towards a New Concept of the Political: A Defence of Universalism and Difference (2024).