Progressive Geographies

Mira L. Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History – Harvard University Press, 2020

The story of how a much-contested legal category—statelessness—transformed the international legal order and redefined the relationship between states and their citizens.

Two world wars left millions stranded in Europe. The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced an unprecedented number of people without national belonging and with nowhere to go. Mira Siegelberg’s innovative history weaves together ideas about law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons, to explore how and why the problem of statelessness compelled a new understanding of the international order in the twentieth century and beyond.

In the years following the First World War, the legal category of statelessness generated novel visions of cosmopolitan political and legal organization and challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Yet, as Siegelberg shows, the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the rights regime created after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights, against alternative political configurations.

Today we live with the results: more than twelve million people are stateless and millions more belong to categories of recent invention, including refugees and asylum seekers. By uncovering the ideological origins of the international agreements that define categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, Statelessness better equips us to confront current dilemmas of political organization and authority at the global level.

Update: Isadora Dullaert reviews this at the LSE Review of Books

Peter Brooks, Balzac’s Lives – NYRB, October 2020

Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s Balzac’s Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

Bernard E. Harcourt is interviewed about his new book Critique and Praxis (Columbia University Press, 2020) here.

Q. How did you come up with the idea for this book?

A. The times of crisis that we live in, to be frank—that’s what compelled me to write this book. I urgently felt that these crises—global climate change, the rise of authoritarianism in this country, the endless war on terror—call on each and every one of us to address the question: How can we achieve a just society? I originally drafted a shorter first version and published it online in an innovative open access, open review format. But the book needed more work, and I felt that I had to debate the current crises and find ways to address them, especially after the 2016 presidential election.

When I wrote that first draft, I was convinced that we all needed to tell each other our answers to the question, “What is to be done?” Over time, I realized that I could not go around telling others “what must be done.” We are far too aware of relations of power today, and live in a far more self-reflective time. And so, as someone who has litigated death penalty cases and been involved in social movements for decades, I ultimately transformed the inquiry, and turned it back onto myself by asking instead, “What more am I to do?” The result is a much longer, 700-page book, and more autobiographical than I had expected. But it does, ultimately, push hard on our shared responsibility for action. And that, I think, is essential. 

Lewis Coyne, Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility – Bloomsbury, October 2020

Hans Jonas (1903–1993) was one of the most important German-Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. A student of Martin Heidegger and close friend of Hannah Arendt, Jonas advanced the fields of phenomenology and practical ethics in ways that are just beginning to be appreciated in the English-speaking world. Drawing here on unpublished and newly translated material, Lewis Coyne brings together for the first time in English Jonas’s philosophy of life, ethic of responsibility, political theory, philosophy of technology and bioethics. 

In Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility, Coyne argues that the aim of Jonas’s philosophy is to confront three critical issues inherent to modernity: nihilism, the ecological crisis and the transhumanist drive to biotechnologically enhance human beings. While these might at first appear disparate, for Jonas all follow from the materialist turn taken by Western thought from the 17th century onwards, and he therefore seeks to tackle all three issues at their collective point of origin. This book explores how Jonas develops a new categorical imperative of responsibility on the basis of an ontology that does justice to the purposefulness and dignity of life: to act in a way that does not compromise the future of humanity on earth. 

Reflecting on this, as we face a potential future of ecological and societal collapse, Coyne forcefully demonstrates the urgency of Jonas’s demand that humanity accept its newfound responsibility as the ‘shepherd of beings’.