Essays on Power: Empire, the Sin Upon My Head

This fascinating book brings together philosophical and historical essays on the European experience of empire. Its main thesis is that at the heart of political experience stands a metaphysical one, with a rich trail of evidence in the historical record. The book sets out to explore this in the case of a succession of European empires between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. Power changed everything. It took away the old conceptions of morality and exposed the nature of the world in a way that forced these empires to make a choice on who they were and what they wanted. The study of this choice, translated into a million other choices and acts, forms the core of the text. It proceeds in two steps. The first examines the philosophical concepts of power; the second investigates the real experience of these concepts in the turbulent history of Europe from the Reformation to the Second World War and its aftermath.

The result is a passionate and elegant work that offers a groundbreaking look into the psychology and psychosis of imperial power and achieves the rarest of featsa philosophical work on politics that actually matters.