In principio era l’Homo Potens

Abstract

The book written by Gianfranco Poggi, Varieties of political experience. Power phenomena in modern society, published in 2014 by the ECPR Press, offers to the reader a series of “minor” writings useful to further clarify and frame his contribution to two fundamental themes: the study of the classics of sociology and the analysis of political institutions. Particularly, the book presents three main interpretative keys: that related to politics and to its forms; that related to the phenomenology of power and finally that of the evolution and of the crisis of the State. The analysis of politics and the State offered by Poggi is substantially a sociology of power. The protagonist of its narration is the homo potens, with his excesses (always possible) and the constraints (procedural and substantial) oriented to limit his “nature”.