Statelessness: On Almost Not Existing

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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. Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Note on Translations and References Introduction: Among the Names of Being Prolegomenon: Aristotle’s Stateless One Part 1: The State Being of State Metaphysics Chapter 1.1: From States Natural to Nonnatural Chapter 1.2: Reason of State in a World without Law Chapter 1.3: The Chain of Being Chapter 1.4: Unfolding the Chain: Becoming Historically Enstated Chapter 1.5: The Genesis of Social Contract Theory Chapter 1.6: The Contracted State’s Necessity Chapter 1.7: Civilized, Barbarian, Savage Intermezzo I Part 2: The State of Anthropological Security Chapter 2.1: State as Human Vocation Chapter 2.2: The Higher Actuality: Of Being Human Chapter 2.3: Being Full of Being-Without Chapter 2.4: Being Represented: Negating the Natural Chapter 2.5: The State of Representation: Hobbes’s Mimetic Leviathan Chapter 2.6: Being Human, Perhaps Chapter 2.7: Ending a Just Natural Life Intermezzo II Part 3: Being-Almost-Absolutely-Without Chapter 3.1: The New Orbis Terrarum Chapter 3.2: Savage Essence Does Not Involve Existence Chapter 3.3: Neither by Nature nor by Necessity Chapter 3.4: Humans, Savages, Animals Chapter 3.5: Being Negative, Almost Nothing: On the Way to Being-Almost-Absolutely-Without Chapter 3.6: The Difference of Not-Nothing Chapter 3.7: A Being without Consequence Postlegomenon: Arendt’s Mass Statelessness Conclusion: Stateness(less) Today Notes Index About the Author