Westphalian Reason: The Political Theology of Sedition

Chapter 3 considers how racial power became integrated into the political project of the state. The logic of “reason of state,” which concerned above all the problem of political stability, hegemonized political power by promising to negotiate the schism between Catholic and Protestant Christianity on the European continent. In the process, reason of state turned the problem of religious threat to government into a form of racial security. Using the case of Elizabethan and Jacobean English statecraft, and its war against sedition, the chapter shows how the birth of the racial security state tacitly reconceived race as a danger to the two bodies of political theology. Such religionized race in the metropole led the ensoulment of dangerous populations to become the fundamental concern of state security, thereby advancing the “second pincer” of race as a universal threat that has helped to constitute antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anticommunism.