‘The political’ is what gives human collectivities the power to govern themselves. This power is repressed in heteronomous political forms but manifests itself openly as such through autonomy. ‘The political’ asserts itself explicitly not least through the invention of ‘politics’, after the invention of the State, then that of the modern Nation State and with it, of the individual and of history. In modernity, ‘the political’, the force that binds human societies, ceases to function through vertical symbolic meaning encompassing the entirety of social life (such as monarchical structures of the political). The ‘political’ instead becomes an infrastructure underpinning collective life concretely from below. It becomes "modern" through a process of metamorphosis which was first encouraged by the liberal upheaval and its deconstruction of the previous regime of meaning encapsulated in the French revolutionary notion of Ancien Régime.
