Progressive Geographies

Lucia Rubinelli, Constituent Power: A History – Cambridge University Press, April 2020

From the French Revolution onwards, constituent power has been a key concept for thinking about the principle of popular power, and how it should be realised through the state and its institutions. Tracing the history of constituent power across five key moments – the French Revolution, nineteenth-century French politics, the Weimar Republic, post-WWII constitutionalism, and political philosophy in the 1960s – Lucia Rubinelli reconstructs and examines the history of the principle. She argues that, at any given time, constituent power offered an alternative understanding of the power of the people to those offered by ideas of sovereignty. Constituent Power: A History also examines how, in turn, these competing understandings of popular power resulted in different institutional structures and reflects on why contemporary political thought is so prone to conflating constituent power with sovereignty.

The first in-depth treatment of the history of the language of constituent power

Offers a clear analysis of the difference between constituent power and ideas of sovereignty

Will appeal equally to historians, who tend to confuse constituent power with notions of sovereignty, political theorists, who often disregard its history, and to scholars in public and constitutional law

There will be a roundtable discussion of the book on March 9 2021 (details here).

Robert von Friedeburg, Luther’s Legacy: The Thirty Years War and the Modern Notion of ‘State’ in the Empire, 1530s to 1790s – Cambridge University Press, 2016

In this new account of the emergence of a distinctive territorial state in early modern Germany, Robert von Friedeburg examines how the modern notion of state does not rest on the experience of a bureaucratic state-apparatus. It emerged to stabilize monarchy from dynastic insecurity and constrain it to protect the rule of law, subjects, and their lives and property. Against this background, Lutheran and neo-Aristotelian notions on the spiritual and material welfare of subjects dominating German debate interacted with Western European arguments against ‘despotism’ to protect the lives and property of subjects. The combined result of this interaction under the impact of the Thirty Years War was Seckendorff’s Der Deutsche Fürstenstaat (1656), constraining the evil machinations of princes and organizing the detailed administration of life in the tradition of German Policey, and which founded a specifically German notion of the modern state as comprehensive provision of services to its subjects.

‘This book offers an original and striking argument about the emergence of the German concept of the State from conflict and dialogue among princes and their subjects amidst the catastrophic circumstances of the Thirty Years War and its immediate aftermath. Friedeburg breaks new ground by shifting the discussion away from the unsteady development of German liberalism and the supposed uncritical and even enthusiastic embrace of monarchism, which allegedly pushed Germany along a deviant ‘special path’ away from western democracy and towards Nazism.’ Peter H. Wilson, University of Hull

I missed this when it came out a few years ago, but looks a very interesting contribution to debates about 17th century political theory and history.

Ziad Elmarsafy, Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet – Bloomsbury, January 2021

Why would a devout Catholic, a committed Protestant, and a Maoist atheist devote their lives and work to the study of esoteric aspects of Islam? How are these aspects ‘good to think with’? What are the theoretical and intellectual problems to which they provide solutions? These are the questions at the heart of Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought. The three French specialists of Islam described above form an intellectual and personal genealogy that structures the core of the text: Massignon taught Corbin, who taught Jambet in his turn. Each of them found in the esoteric a solution to otherwise insurmountable problems: desire for Massignon, certainty for Corbin, and resurrection/immortality for Jambet. Over the course of three long chapters focused on the life and work of each writer, the book maps the central place of esoteric Islam in the intellectual life of twentieth and twenty-first century France.

“In this remarkable work, Ziad Elmarsafy re-opens the esoteric archive of modern French Islam. It requires a scholar of exceptional cultural, philosophical and linguistic range to even begin to do justice to Massignon, Corbin and Jambet’s work and Elmarsafy is that scholar. As he reconstructs the intellectual history of French engagements with esoteric Islam, Elmarsafy not only tells a story that has never properly been told before, but creates an entirely new genealogy of the evolution of modern French thought that forces us to re-pose classic questions about truth, subjectivity and freedom we thought we had already answered. Finally, and most importantly, however, this book beautifully exemplifies its own central argument about French esoteric Islam: Elmarsafy’s deeply affirmative readings of Massignon, Corbin and Jambet are distinguished throughout by the very intellectual hospitality or openness to the other that characterises their own engagements with the Islamic tradition. This is a major intellectual achievement by one of the most important scholars of comparative literature and thought working today and we are all in his debt.” –  Arthur Bradley, Professor of Comparative Literature, Lancaster University, UK, 

Sloterdijk’s Anthropotechnics – special issue of Angelaki edited by Patrick Roney and Andrea Rossi

Contributions by Thomas Macho, Sascha Rashof, Patrick Roney, Serge Trottein, Gary E Aylesworth, Christina Howells, Andrea Rossi, Antonio Lucci, Oliver Davis, Andrea Capra, and Robert Hughes. The editorial and the articles by Davis and Hughes are open access, but the rest requires subscription.

Michael Saward, Democratic Design – Oxford University Press, 2021

Democracy faces stern tests around the world in the twenty-first century. Democratic Design argues that to respond effectively and creatively, democrats need to work with a versatile new toolkit of concepts and institutions. The book assembles this toolkit — the democratic design framework — through an original blend of design thinking and democratic theory and practice. It shows how to use the framework to renew and enliven our ideas of democracy across a range of contexts.

The book explores a wide range of institutions, from the familiar (such as parliamentary procedures) to the innovative (such as citizens’ assemblies). It underlines the importance of systemic and contextual design, and the practical enactment of democratic values such as equality, freedom and participation.

Democratic Design shows how a comprehensive approach to rethinking the present and future of democratic governance is possible, indeed essential. It draws together, and moves beyond, the best of existing theories and models by devising a new framework that is both practical and theoretically robust.

Reece Jones, White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall – Beacon, September 2021

The first book to show that racial exclusion was behind all of the United States’ immigration laws–from Chinese Exclusion through the Trump presidency.

While many Americans believe there have always been rules about who could enter the country, the reality is that the first national immigration law was not passed until 1875, ninety-nine years after the Declaration of Independence. As the first non-white Chinese immigrants arrived, Congress passed laws to ban them. In each era that followed, the fear of “the great replacement” of whites with non-white immigrations drove the push for more restrictions. Although the US is often mythologized as a nation of immigrants, the mainstreaming of anti-immigrant politics by Trump in 2016 was a reversion to the ugly norm of the past.

In White Borders, Jones reveals that since the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619, the English Colonies that became the US were based on the dual foundation of open immigration for whites from Northern Europe and racial exclusion of slaves from Africa, Native Americans, and, eventually, immigrants from other parts of the world. He exposes the connections between the Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s, the “Keep America American” nativism of the 1920s, and the “Build the Wall” chants of the 2010s. Along the way, we meet a bizarre cast of characters such as John Tanton, Cordelia Scaife May, and Stephen Miller who have moved fringe ideas about “white genocide” and “race suicide” into mainstream political discourse. This exposé proves that while immigration crackdowns are justified as protecting American jobs and workers, they have always been about saving the fleeting idea of a white America.

“White Borders is a searing indictment of the US immigration restrictions from Chinese Exclusion through the Trump presidency. This powerful and meticulously argued book reveals that while immigration crackdowns are justified as protecting jobs and workers, they’ve always been about saving and protecting the racist idea of a white America.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

“With eloquent prose and masterful storytelling, Reece Jones narrates the hard history of immigration policies of the US settler colonial state that was founded and rooted in white supremacy, from Chinese exclusion to the border wall.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Carl Schmitt’s Early Legal-Theoretical Writings: Statute and Judgment and the Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual, edited and translated by Lars Vine and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin – Cambridge University Press, May 2021

Many of Carl Schmitt’s major works have by now been translated, with two notable exceptions: Schmitt’s two early monographs Statute and Judgment (first published in 1912) and The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual (first published in 1914). In these two works Schmitt presents a theory of adjudication as well as an account of the state’s role in the realization of the rule of law, which together form the theoretical basis on which Schmitt later developed his political and constitutional theory. This new book makes these two key texts available in English translation for the first time, together with an introduction that relates the texts to their historical context, to Schmitt’s other works, and to contemporary discussions in legal and constitutional theory.