Peter Gratton uses my last post to say something about his own work on Boulainviller/Boulainvilliers (the spelling is disputed) here. As I said in that last post, I’ve not read much of him so far, but he looks interesting. For a good introduction to his work you could do a lot worse than to read the two long footnotes from Peter’s forthcoming The State of Sovereignty that are included in his post. Peter has kindly send me the introduction to that book and it promises to be a really important contribution. We’re clearly working on very closely related projects, and a lot of the twentieth-century/contemporary writers he’s been reading – Schmitt, Kantorowicz, Foucault, Agamben, Derrida et. al. – are ones I have been looking at too. The same goes for the more historical figures – Gregory of Tours, Bodin, Rousseau, etc. But since we are asking different questions we’re coming up with very different readings.
