Abstract

The essay is a review of Giorgio Agamben's work, "Il regno e la gloria". Agamben argues that two political paradigms derive from Christian theology: on the one hand, political theology, that establishes the transcendence of sovereign power upon the idea of a unique God; on the other hand, the economic theology, that substitutes to the latter the idea of "oikonomia" conceived as an immanent-domestic order of divine and human life, an order that is not immediately political. It is argued that political philosophy and the modern theory of sovereignty derive from the first paradigm, while the modern "biopolitics", and the priority of economy with respect to every other aspect of social life, are based upon the second one.