The Enlightenment: Fields of Reason and Possibility: 7 Political Thought and the Reconfiguration of Authority — From Divine Order to Collective Agency

The Enlightenment did not merely extend the reach of reason; it restructured the very field in which power, legitimacy, and agency were conceived. Political thought became a laboratory for testing the possible configurations of collective life, reframing authority as something constructed and contestable rather than divinely ordained.

From Theological Legitimacy to Relational Sovereignty

Medieval and early modern governance derived its authority from transcendent sources — divine sanction, hereditary right, or cosmic hierarchy. Enlightenment thinkers, however, reframed sovereignty as emerging from the relations among individuals, a collective pact rather than a divine command. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each proposed relational models of order, in which society becomes a field of negotiation rather than a fixed inheritance.

Rights, Representation, and the Architecture of Possibility

The political imagination of the Enlightenment was animated by a new construal of personhood: each subject as a potential locus of agency, reason, and entitlement. The idea of universal rights displaced inherited hierarchies, transforming the structure of political possibility. The shift was not merely moral but ontological: society itself became thinkable as a constructed, revisable system.

Public Reason and Deliberative Potential

Building upon the public sphere, political discourse became a site of reflexive actualisation. The circulation of pamphlets, treatises, and debates produced an infrastructure for collective reasoning, where authority could be justified or challenged through argument rather than decree. The political was no longer a given order but a dynamic field of construal—a site of ongoing reconfiguration.

Tensions of Inclusion and Exclusion

The Enlightenment’s reconfiguration of authority was partial and uneven. Women, colonised peoples, and non-propertied classes were often excluded from the rights and agency newly proclaimed universal. Yet these exclusions seeded latent possibilities: contradictions that would animate subsequent revolutions in both thought and practice.

Implications for Relational Possibility

Political thought during the Enlightenment redefined the conditions of collective individuation. Authority was no longer an external imposition but a relational process—something continuously negotiated, distributed, and reflexively modulated. The political thus became a primary site for the becoming of possibility, where new configurations of power and participation could be imagined and enacted.

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Modulatory voices:

• John Locke: reason, property, and consent as foundations of political order.

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the general will and collective individuation.

• Hannah Arendt: public action and the plurality of human agency.