Space and Political Universalism in Early Modern Physics and Philosophy

How did early modern philosophy of space shape the modern concept of political universalism? In this book, Pablo Bustinduy persuasively argues that political universalism emerged from both the developments of Newtonian science and the formulation of the modern philosophy of the State. In the metaphysics of an open, empty, abstract and absolute space, Bustinduy suggests, the universalist project of modern politics found its logical model and foundation. There, the anxiety of a dislocated world was overcome, and the ontology of modern physics found a specific political expression that, despite being besieged by multiple crises, still animates our political imagination.

By offering a political reading of early modern philosophy of space, Space and Political Universalism in Early Modern Physics and Philosophy reveals the connections between the logical development of early modern science, the contemporary elaborations of the philosophy of the State, and the historical articulations of the Westphalian system, early capitalist social formations, and the European colonial project. In doing so, it offers a powerful reflection on how we might detach democracy from the ’perilous metaphysics’ of infinite space that has engendered political violence and domination, positing space as an emptiness that prevents the closure of the political itself.

Pablo Bustinduy is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan, Italy, where he is researching the political economy of contemporary wage policy in Europe. Previously, he completed a PhD thesis at The New School, which obtained the Alfred Schutz Memorial Award in Philosophy and Sociology 2021. He is the author of ’A Populist Foreign Policy? The Impact of the Trump Presidency on the Transatlantic Relation’, International Studies, 59 (2022), 28-42, and has edited, translated and contributed chapters to over a dozen books in Spanish. He has taught courses in Political Theory and International Politics at The City College of New York, Columbia University and New York University, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. From 2014 to 2019, he was involved in European and Spanish politics, holding public offices at the European and Spanish parliaments. This is his first authored book.