Paradigmatic Premises of the Modern Political Imaginary

The paradigmatic boundaries of modern political imaginary were drawn in Europe throughout the seventeenth century. Although it went through several intra-paradigmatic revisions, the mainstream approach to politics has been set by this framework first in the West and then in the “rest,” along with the unprecedented civilizational expansion of the West over other parts of the world. Suffice to say that the authors of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, the American Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Human and Civic Rights in 1789, which are popularly considered the universal framework of reference for contemporary political values, took the individualist natural law approach of the seventeenth century as the point of departure for their texts. This article aims to describe modern political imaginary through the paradigmatic premises it relies on thereby providing a de-constructive contribution to the critical literature on the modern conception of politics. Cutting across several different and even rival theoretical reflections on politics developed in the West since the great revolution of the seventeenth century, these premises can be summarized as the notion of the autonomy of politics, lack of the idea of the “good life,” the axis of freedom and equality, the conception of natural law and natural rights, individualism and rationalism. M. Akif KAYAPINAR

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