Progressive Geographies

As The Birth of Territory inches towards publication, the University of Chicago Press page now has three endorsements for the book.

Neil Brenner, Harvard University

“Stuart Elden has written a pathbreaking book on a foundational concept in modern political and geographical thought. Drawing together deep philosophical knowledge, historical understanding, and philological expertise, Elden’s pioneering investigation compels us fundamentally to rethink some of the basic assumptions regarding state space that have long underpinned modern political theory and social research. In so doing, Elden also opens up new horizons for understanding the transformed geographies of political life that are being produced under early twenty-first century conditions. A brilliant, provocative intervention.”

John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles

“This is a brilliant intellectual exegesis of the concept of territory that will be of wide interest in a range of academic fields, from international relations to historical sociology and the history of political thought.”

David N. Livingstone, Queen’s University Belfast

“Stuart Elden’s The Birth of Territory is a wonderful achievement unmatched in previous writing on place, power, and politics. For it does nothing less than elucidate in remarkable detail a two-thousand-year history of the conditions for the very possibility of its own subject—the idea of territory itself. That is what makes it transcendental history of the first order.”