June 9th, 2012
By Ralph Hancock,
The modern nation-state is so familiar to us as a political form that it seems an obvious way of organizing individuals into larger societies. We take it to be, if not the only form conceivable, at least the clear default solution to the problem, inherent in the human condition, of reconciling the necessity of order and authority with some scope of freedom for individuals and for non-coercive associations. And so it comes as a surprise, even a bewildering surprise to us to recognize the internal contradictions that beset, or even the downright mystery that surrounds, the modern political form par excellence…
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Comment posted at other website, republished here:
I enjoyed reading this formulation of the problem. A question/comment: Isn’t the progression of this ‘statist project’, as you describe it, inseparable from the continued (scientific) conquest of nature? For example, technical conquest of all of the facts of human reproduction would be the necessary in order to justify (in theoretical terms, at least) the political abandonement of privledging one manifestation of eros over another