Statelessness: On Almost Not Existing - Brossura

Brown, Tony C.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1517912423 ISBN 13: 9781517912420

Casa editrice: Univ of Minnesota Pr, 2022

Riassunto

A pathbreaking new genealogy of statelessness

Just as the modern state and the citizenship associated with it are commonly thought of as a European invention, so too is citizenship’s negation in the form of twentieth-century diaspora and statelessness. Statelessness sets forth a new genealogy, suggesting that Europe first encountered mass statelessness neither inside its own borders nor during the twentieth century, as Hannah Arendt so influentially claimed, but outside of itself—in the New World, several hundred years earlier.

Through close readings of political philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau to Kant, Tony C. Brown argues that statelessness became a central problem for political thought early on, with far-reaching implications for thinking both on the state and on being human. What Europeans thought they saw among the “savages” of the Americas was life without political order, life less than human. Lacking almost everything those deemed clearly human had achieved, the stateless existed in a radically precarious, almost inhuman privation.

And yet this existence also raised the unsettling possibility that state-based existence may not be inevitable, necessary, or even ideal.  This possibility, as Brown shows, prompts the response—as defensive as it was aggressive—that we call Enlightenment political philosophy, which arguably still orders much thinking on being stateless today, including our discourses concerning migrants and Indigenous peoples.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Tony C. Brown is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. He is author of The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Minnesota Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2022
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1517912423
• ISBN 13: 9781517912420
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 312
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Paesi Bassi