Dante’s Modernity

Claude Lefort’s ‘Dante’s Modernity’ presents a detailed and highly original interpretation of Dante’s Monarchia. Lefort casts Dante as the first political thinker with a concept of humanity defined as the whole of the human race, the first to imagine a universal society in political terms, and the first to reveal the formative role of force, of wars and division in the advent of such a political unity. Tracing the career of Dante’s innovations in the political thought and praxis of the succeeding centuries, Lefort then shows how what is ‘new’ in Dante cannot be separated from its later avatars — from the varied realizations, distortions, and misapplications it would inspire at later historical junctures. Any contemporary realization of the potential inherent in Dante’s innovative idea of sovereignty would require the project of ‘disentangling’ the links between universalism, imperialism, and nationalism that have been instituted in its name.