Statelessness

On Almost Not Existing

Tony C. Brown

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English

University of Minnesota Press
01 February 2023

Social & political philosophy; Migration, immigration & emigration; Political science & theory

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.

By: Tony C. Brown
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 25mm
ISBN: 9781517912420
ISBN 10: 1517912423
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 01 February 2023
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Tony C. Brown is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of MinnesotaTwin Cities. He is author of The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic.

Reviews for Statelessness: On Almost Not Existing

"""Magnificently learned, deeply rigorous, and exceptionally clear, this decisive, original work fundamentally and importantly reframes our understanding of statelessness as an operative political category.""—Martin Crowley, University of Cambridge ""Statelessness addresses a truly vital issue, and Tony C. Brown's analysis works to 'denaturalize' the state as the only and inevitable form of human social organization.""—James C. Scott, author of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States"