The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic

The Politics to Come brings together an international collection of thinkers to consider the meaning of liberal democratic modernity at a moment when its future has never been less certain. It examines the explosive threats the liberal order confronts today: financial meltdown, religious extremism, environmental catastrophe. Yet, it also seeks to place these - singularly modern - crises within a much longer history. For the contributors to this collection, it is the ancient religious tradition called ’the messianic’ that provides the critical lens through which modernity may be interrogated. In its ongoing struggles with the messianic, liberal modernity confronts the promise and threat of a radically new Politics to Come. So what are the Politics to Come? How do they manifest themselves throughout history? Why does the possibility of a messianic judgement continue to haunt the western political imaginary? This collection offers a series of political, philosophical and theological perspectives from which the future of liberal modernity - if it has one - can be imagined.

Arthur Bradley is Senior Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University, UK.
He is the author of Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy; Derrida’s Of Grammatology: A Philosophical Guide and (with Andrew Tate) The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11.
Paul Fletcher (1965-2008) was Lecturer in Religious Studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)political Theology.