This paper separates Wollstonecraft's critical concept of “machiavelian” power and the capacity for domination, from a neutral concept of politics as the complex processes surrounding the power to govern, from her normative account of popular sovereignty which emphasizes collective political power to ensure the discharge of natural duty by way of civil and political rights and duties. Wollstonecraft's voice as political judge—which is audible throughout her work, but particularly clearly in her book on the French Revolution—articulates the ways that political power can be abused and misused, and can also be effective. Her theory is political in several ways: she interrogates the nature of political power and its explanatory importance; she consistently articulates political judgment about matters both conventionally political and social; she offers a theoretical justification for the expansion of the scope of politics to cover relations that hitherto were thought to be outside its domain; and finally her work itself constitutes a political intervention.

This paper sets out diverse ways that Shakespeare's dramas can be read politically. Critics and political theorists have often concentrated on what Shakespeare said about politics—whether he was broadly republican or monarchist, protofeminist or a patriarchalist—as well as concentrating on his references to political themes of his day. Focusing on political readings of Merchant of Venice and Othello, I argue that, rather, we should pay attention to how Shakespeare plays with numerous styles of political action and role, from statesmanship and the competiton for state office or for sovereignty, to the everyday relations of kinship and friendship that interact with state government and law, and to individuals' struggles against politically established power—patriarchy, class, state law—that constrains or oppresses them. The figure of the Machiavellian political operator, whether acting for good or for ill, is contrasted with the open speaker of truth in public.

The Wellek Library Lectures from which these two books developed were given in 1996. The English version (2015) translates the material of the lectures that address the themes of “the conversion of violence,” in particular in the philosophies of Hobbes and Hegel, and of “inconvertible violence.” “Inconvertible violence” signals those forms and practices of violence that annihilate possibilities of resistance, that cannot be arrested by political power and transformed into civil and social exchange. The French version (2010) includes a second part made up of further essays—on Clausewitz, Marxism, Lenin and Gandhi, and Schmitt and Hobbes—in which Balibar continues to wrestle with the categories “violence” and “politics” and the complex, elusive relationships between them.