In a nutshell

In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple crises.  Apocalyptic rhetoric and imagery were rife within fourteenth- and fifteenth-century European society, as people sought answers to the various crises they faced, and astrology, which could be used in their attempts to divine the course of future events, was just one way for people to make sense of these uncertain times.  However, due to the fuzzy quality of astrology, as it was a discipline that overlapped the realms of science, magic, and faith, of heresy and orthodoxy, such an interest was deeply problematic.

I divide my book into two halves.

The first half sees me investigating the liminality of astrology in the Middle Ages to ascertain why exactly it was so contentious and problematic.  The first chapter regards what traditional authorities, such as the fifth-century Augustine of Hippo or the thirteenth-century Thomas Aquinas, had to say about the nature of astrology and divining the future and how their positions would be important for later critics of astrology.  The second chapter regards the rhetorical strategies used by medieval critics to denigrate people’s interest in astrology, by which they sought to portray those devotees as foolish or simple.  In the third chapter, I look at contemporary medieval Europeans’ perceptions of Iberia as a land of magic, due to the plethora of Jewish and Muslim intellectual centers throughout the peninsula that produced sidereal texts in great numbers.

The second part of the book uses the Crown of Aragon, the capital of which was Barcelona, as a case study because it was a center of astrological and astronomical text production during the later Middle Ages that grappled with the problems plaguing the rest of Europe. I tie together the themes I bring out in my book’s first half to show how they resonate within the Crown of Aragon in particular.  Chapter four looks at one particularly strong king, Peter “the Ceremonious,” and how his interest in astrology and astronomy did not raise an eyebrow, due to his traditional ways of applying monarchical authority.  This was in contrast to his son, John “the Hunter,” who preferred astrology and magic, trendy fashion and music, to dealing with pressing political and theological matters, thus earning him significant criticism.  The sixth and final chapter sees the ascension of a particularly pious king, Martin, the younger brother of John, to the throne of the Crown of Aragon and how he distances himself from the perceived excesses of his older brother’s court.

In my epilogue, I take such recognizable figures as Christopher Columbus and Ronald Reagan, separated by centuries, to show how the medieval themes I brought up resonate into the early modern and modern eras alike.

In a nutshell

Why Don’t American Cities Burn? is about the collision between urban transformation and rightward moving social politics.

A series of economic, demographic, and spatial changes have transformed American cities, producing an urban form unlike any other in history. At the same time, American politics has been moving right. Federal and state governments have been cutting the safety net, reducing aid to cities, attacking trade unions, allowing the value of the minimum wage to erode, and, whenever possible, applying market-based solutions to public business.

The coexistence of these trends produces a collision with ordinary people caught in the middle. The evidence is all around us in rising rates of poverty and homelessness, declining real wages, decayed inner cities, failing public services, home mortgage foreclosures, high unemployment, and mass incarceration.

What is amazing is how quietly all this happened. In contrast to the 1960s and early 1970s, American cities did not burn. Until Occupy Wall Street in 2011, people did not take to the streets or mount massive protests at increased inequality and its sources. And, when in 2011 they did, the protests were remarkable for their non-violence. There was nothing in America like the spring of 2005 in France where riots broke out in about 300 cities.

Why did American cities not explode as they had forty or fifty years earlier?

The first answer is negative: the lack of civil violence did not mean that the conditions that sparked earlier riots had disappeared. For the most part, they persisted and in some instances worsened.

The second answer is that all violence has not disappeared. Rather, it has turned inward—away from collective protest and toward intrapersonal violence among residents of the nation’s de-industrialized cities. Why have black men unable to leave bleak inner-city neighborhoods vented their rage on one another and not, as they did forty or fifty years ago, on the agents and symbols of a politics, culture, and economy that exclude them from first-class citizenship?

The third answer is that a combination of three factors helped account for the near disappearance of civil violence: they are a shift in the ecology of power, the management of marginalization, and the incorporation and control of immigrants.  By a shift in the ecology of power, I mean major changes in the demography of city populations, where they live, and who holds power. The management of marginalization refers to a whole series of new methods for managing or containing poor people that result in a depoliticization which makes collective action difficult. The incorporation and control of immigration points to the distinctive way in which the nation deals with its newcomers. Birth-right citizenship incorporates the second generation into citizenship, and naturalization remains relatively easy while fear of deportation works as a potent form of social control.

In a nutshell

Leadership impunity for the commission of atrocity crimes is on the losing side of history now.

To understand why the highest political and military leaders are increasingly at risk of indictment and prosecution today—why Muammar Gaddafi and his son Saif Al-Islam were indicted by the International Criminal Court last year, why Sudan’s current president, Omar Al-Bashir, was indicted for genocide in Darfur and defies to this day the authority of the same court, why Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are finally standing trial in The Hague before the Yugoslav Tribunal, why former Liberian President Charles Taylor awaits the judgment of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, why three of the surviving top Khmer Rouge leaders of the Pol Pot regime are on trial today in Phnom Penh—requires looking back to the turbulent decade of the 1990s.

All the Missing Souls is the story of this transformational moment in history, a personal account of the creation and rise of five major war crimes tribunals during the 1990s, and it is also about the atrocities that shaped their mandates.

I write in the book that what happened was “one of the most ambitious judicial experiments in the history of humankind—a global assault on the architects of atrocities—found its purpose as mass killings and ethnic cleansing consumed entire regions of the earth.  The grand objective since 1993 has been to end impunity at the highest levels of government and the military not only for genocide, which captures the popular imagination with its heritage in the Holocaust, but also for the far less understood offenses of crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

I had the lead American job, as the U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues and before that as senior counsel to America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dr. Madeleine Albright, in building the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and the permanent International Criminal Court.

So the book is an insider’s account of eight years of American and international policy-making in response to mass atrocities and the demand for justice in the aftermath.  The narrative is both self-critical and comprehensive, guiding you through the daily diplomatic jousts and investigative challenges of international justice, where political calculations and pressures constantly dance with judicial imperatives.

I wrote All the Missing Souls over a three-year period, from 2007 through 2010.  I waited to write this personal history because I aimed to describe the rapid evolution of international justice during the 1990s through my own reflective prism of experience.  I wanted the dust to settle so I would be honest and self-critical.  This is a much more compelling and introspective book now in 2012 than it would have been if I had written it in 2001 right after leaving government service.

In a nutshell

Today, on just about every desk there is a gray box emitting a range of wires.  Eighty years ago, this data processing box was less conspicuous, non-electronic, and made from wood—a literal paper machine.

My book explores the way this indexing “machine” set out on its triumphant march, entering offices and orderly rooms around 1930 as a universal and crucial instrument for data processing, and eventually transmuting into the “Universal Machine” known as the computer.

Paper Machines follows the development of the index card along its various historical breaches, beginning with the first references to the indexing of knowledge in early modern times.  The book examines the almost accidental introduction and gradual assertion of card index boxes in libraries around 1800 and glances at the production conditions of literature with the aid of index files, before suggesting a discursive transference between the institutions of writing—libraries and offices.

Among the book’s protagonists are—besides the Swiss polymath Conrad Gesner, one of the most influential classificators of the 16th century—Melvil Dewey, known as the father of the Decimal Classification System, and William Croswell, yet unknown as America’s laziest librarian, but inventor of Harvard College Library’s card catalog in 1812.

Paper Machines unfolds the long history of the index card from the Baroque Period to the dawning age of electronic communication in an unexpectedly amusing way: as a history of failures. It is an astonishing story, and not only for librarians, bibliophiles and historians of the art of unelectronic data processing.

Since this is a history of information pieces and how they relate to each other, the text may also be read in different—and probably uncommon—ways rather than simply chronologically.

The ideal way for reading the bound book would be to cut all the episodes into pieces, shuffle them, rearrange them into the specific idiosyncratic flow in which you would like to consume this story.  Mark the references you like most, link them to other passages within in the text and outside, draw connections to other stories and texts you know from different contexts or to those texts in your personal database. Implement this story about weaving information into your own network of knowledge production.

In a nutshell

The Unintended Reformation is a wide-ranging revisionist history that concerns the present as much as the past.  It argues that in central respects, North American and European life in the early twenty-first century is the complex, long-term, unintended result of the Reformation era’s unresolved doctrinal disagreements and destructive religio-political conflicts.

Latin Christianity around 1500 was not “religion” understood as something separate and separable from the rest of human life.  It was rather an institutionalized worldview that sought to inform all its dimensions.  Rejections of the Roman church in the Protestant Reformation therefore had widely ramifying effects.

The book analyzes six domains in which the Reformation’s impact was especially consequential: the relationship among science, religion, and metaphysics; the basis for truth claims about “Life Questions” related to human values and meaning; the institutional locus of political power; moral discourse and moral practices; human desires and capitalism; and higher education and assumptions about knowledge.  One chapter in the book is devoted to each of these areas, tracing their respective transformations between the sixteenth century and the present.

Magisterial and radical Protestant reformers addressed long acknowledged problems of the late medieval church by turning to God’s word alone, in the Bible.  Collectively, this produced incompatible truth claims about scripture’s meaning and applications.  The resulting disagreements about answers to Life Questions have been with us since the 1520s.  Efforts were made in early modern Europe to contain and control their socially divisive, sometimes politically subversive effects.  Most influentially through modern philosophy, the content of rival answers to Life Questions has been augmented and complicated in countless ways.  Yet the history of modern philosophy since Descartes shows that secular answers based on reason have been and remain no less contested than Protestant answers based on scripture.

The latter-day outcome of Reformation-era disagreements is manifest today in a hyperpluralism of religious and secular truth claims.  Sovereign states are the hegemonic institutions that permit individuals to believe whatever they wish so long as they are politically obedient.  Pervasive consumerist capitalism provides the main cultural counterweight to ideological heterogeneity.

The Unintended Reformation is structured as six genealogical (but not teleological) narratives.  Each begins in the late Middle Ages and runs to the present, emphasizing the transformative effects of the Reformation era.  The book transgresses conventional schemes of historical periodization.  It rejects any attempt to “cover everything” as incompatible with its objective to reconstruct an explanatorily powerful long-term narrative.

I also reject the scholarly division of labor whereby historians of the modern era shoulder full responsibility for explaining the formation of the contemporary world.  The Unintended Reformation argues that historical realities from five and six centuries ago are still influencing the present in profound yet largely unacknowledged ways.

Methodologically, the book endeavors to show that fresh insight into historical change is possible by disentangling domains of human life that were lived in intertwined ways.  The chapters’ respective subjects are distinguished for analytical purposes in pursuit of explanatory insight.

The entire book must be read if it is to be understood.  Readers who concentrate on individual chapters at the expense of the whole will miss the book’s overarching argument.

In a nutshell

Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores combines people, history, and law. The book is composed of six stories about early Americans and how brushes with the law affected everyday life.

If the chapters are not exactly “ripped from the headlines,” they do focus on attention-grabbing criminal or civil conflicts and the way ordinary people stumbled through complicated legal tangles. We may not be able to hear their voices, but their actions are familiar. Indeed, they are remarkably like us.

The chapters range geographically from New England to New Amsterdam and from Maryland to Bermuda. Men and women, free and enslaved, humans and spirits rub elbows throughout the pages as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries collide with the early nineteenth.  Although social issues dominate the story lines, sex and money are integral to the narratives.

The first chapter explores slander in New Amsterdam and the creative use of scurrilous language by Dutch settlers. The word “whore” may allude to illicit sexuality in modern parlance, but in New Amsterdam it was a slur directed at unscrupulous women in the marketplace.

In chapter two, male and female witches command attention by instilling fear and generating havoc in Bermuda, while sexual overtones contribute to the accusations against them. Despite their best efforts, however, even the devil’s minions eventually succumb to the rule of law.

Domestic violence is the subject of chapter three, a narrative that analyzes the way abused women surrounded themselves with friends and neighbors as a protection against brutal husbands.

The plot of chapter four involves attempted rape, as an enslaved ferry captain defends himself in court against charges brought by an elite but, perhaps, conniving woman. The outcome of the case depends on whether the reader believes what “he said” rather than what “she said,” with only a Rashomon ending to fall back on.

The desperate financial travails of Samuel Banister serve as background to a murder story in chapter five, while chapter six demonstrates how the testimony of a ghost could determine the outcome of a trial and influence bastardy proceedings, property ownership, and national politics.

In a nutshell

This is the first modern history of officially-acknowledged female rulers in major states.

It focuses on Europe between 1328 and 1796 because that is the only time and place with a sizable number of them.  Women were never candidates in Europe’s major elective polities like the Holy Roman Empire or the Papal states.  But in most European kingdoms—France became the outstanding exception—women could inherit thrones after 1300 in the absence of suitable males.

In order to identify these female rulers, I use numismatics, a discipline ignored by “mainstream” political history.  Ever since Cleopatra VII, bona fide women rulers almost everywhere were literally “on the money,” and their coins survive.  This criterion locates thirty women sovereigns in fourteen widely-separated European states, including the “westernizing” eighteenth-century Russian empire (the book includes a map on pages xiv-xv).

My 458-year sample seems long enough to sketch meaningful changes in the conditions under which women exercised supreme political authority, but also small enough to permit at least a brief sketch of every one. Their failures are as instructive as their successes.

The thread that gives the book its conceptual unity is how these female sovereigns handled the problem of matrimony. Like conventional queens, they were expected to produce legitimate heirs. Unsurprisingly, ninety percent of them married at some point; Elizabeth I of England became the first of three exceptions.

But should women invested with sovereign authority be expected to show conventional subordination and deference to husbands?  The answers varied with individuals, but evolved over time towards greater wifely autonomy. The anomalous situation in which women became “kings” (and were frequently crowned as such) created enormous problems in defining the role of their husbands.  Five of them succeeded their wives on the throne, in 1395, 1399, 1401, 1441, and 1694.  But three were murdered (in 1345, 1567, and 1762), while another fled to a French monastery in 1421 and yet another died insane in a foreign prison in 1586.

In a nutshell

The book falls into two parts, the first with two chapters, and the second with three. The first part concentrates on legal thought, the second on the interaction between specific bodies of law and the nature and effects of empire; the two projects are deeply interrelated. Like the parts, the individual chapters were written so as to be readable and intelligible on their own, though I think each also benefits from being read alongside the other questions I was asking at the time.

Let me attempt to introduce the two parts in turn, with the caution that many themes are present in one form or another throughout the book.

For a variety of reasons, many people think about the law in terms of rules. What are the rules governing sales tax, for example, and how might I get around them? A richer historical perspective on the law would embrace questions such as the following.  How have rules changed and why?  What kinds of pressures, voiced by what kinds of people, in what kinds of contexts, brought about that change?  How did lay people, and how did legal actors, understand the relationship between legal rules and other norms?  One can imagine many others.

For complicated reasons, Roman law as an academic discipline long remained fixated on describing its rules.  How did one write a will at Rome?  What was the age of marriage?  Books had titles like “The Roman law of slavery.”

My book attempts to side-step questions about what Romans lawyers thought—in order to ask about how they thought.  Why did they think law changed?  How did they think change in the law could or should be justified?  And how did they think legal institutions could or should adapt to social change?

For the fact of the matter was, Roman society was in constant flux.  The same might be said of nearly any society, of course.  But Roman society underwent acute change of particular kinds from a very specific source: it was an imperial society, and so it was constantly absorbing new populations, who spoke new languages and brought with them new customs.

As a related problem, Roman law initially came into existence when Roman society was largely confined to the city of Rome and its extensive agricultural hinterland.  But imperial action rapidly carried Romans farther afield.  How could the institutions of a small Mediterranean city be expanded to regulate a world empire? And could that expansion really take place without significant effects, for good or ill, on the system of law—and the very rule of law—in Rome itself?

In a nutshell

The Stalinist regime was among the most repressive and violent in all human history. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Yet, paradoxically, at the very moment that the Soviet government was killing hundreds of thousands of people, it was engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of incarcerations and executions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people’s wellbeing. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand-in-hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture.

Cultivating the Masses examines the Party leadership’s pursuit of both “positive” and “negative” population policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming both the socio-economic order and the very nature of its citizens, and ready to employ unprecedented levels of social intervention to do so.

In this book, I analyze a range of social policies and present Soviet social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices—practices that arose in conjunction with ambitions to refashion society.

Soviet social policies reflected a new ethos by which state officials and nongovernment professionals sought to reshape their societies in accordance with scientific and aesthetic norms. This rationalist ethos of social intervention first arose in nineteenth-century Europe, and it subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive policies in countries around the world.

Social intervention intensified with the rise of mass warfare. The tremendous mobilizational demands of the First World War in particular impelled the leaders of all combatant countries to expand their use of economic controls, health measures, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence—all of which became prominent features of the Soviet system.

After European leaders agreed to create the European Monetary Union (EMU) in the late 1990s, the European Council in Brussels established a competition among graphic artists to design the new currency.  The competition protocol requested that euro bills have non-specific images that might suggest any venue that appeared generically European.  The coins were the exception.  One side of the coins would have the denomination; the other side would have an easily recognizable national symbol.

The design schizophrenia built into the euro coins is manifest in the political dimensions of the European sovereign debt crisis.  The struggle between national interest and plans to conserve the EMU plagues ongoing attempts to adjudicate the full blown crisis that emerged in 2010 when Greece began to head towards default.

In this climate of economic volatility, European right nationalist parties and their ideas have gained increased political traction and notable electoral successes.  Even in Sweden, a right populist party, the Swedish Democrats, received 5.7% of the vote making it eligible for a seat in the Congress.  In the April 2011 Finnish legislative elections, the right nationalist True Finn Party came in third place and achieved the same percentage of votes as the Finnish Social Democrats.  A resistance to bailing out defaulting EMU members and a general antipathy to Europe unites diverse right parties. The economic events that constitute the crisis have made it legitimate for nationalist politicians to argue that Europe is a dangerous economic and political project.  Exit from the eurozone is the cornerstone of French National Front leader, Marine Le Pen’s current campaign for the presidency.

During this period, nationalist rhetoric and policy proposals have become part of center right, and in some instances left, political discourse.  In October 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a gathering of the youth members of the Christian Democratic Union party that Germany’s attempt to build a multicultural society had “failed, utterly failed.”

In a nutshell

Constitutional Cliffhangers is about six situations in which the Constitution’s provisions for selecting, replacing, and punishing presidents are seriously vulnerable.

Each chapter starts out with a fictional scenario that dramatizes one situation of danger. The chapter then discusses the legal and practical angles that the players would fight over in the ensuing drama. Interspersed in that discussion, I have further snippets from the fictional scenario. By the end of the chapter, the reader has an idea of how that chapter’s “cliffhanger” could arise, how it might “sound” as it happened, how it would play out politically and legally, and what (if anything) we might do to prevent it.

In Chapter 4, for instance, the vice presidency is vacant and the president is killed, which touches off a succession dispute between the Speaker of the House and the secretary of state. There are serious constitutional problems with having the Speaker in the line of succession, and the chapter shows how the facts on the ground could lead to a power struggle. In an ordinary situation, the Speaker would take over and there would be no controversy, but if things are just so, we could have a disaster on our hands.

Bookending the six cliffhangers are two chapters that look for deeper meaning in all of this. For instance, the intersection of law and politics is very interesting to me. So many of these intricate legal questions would turn not on the best legal analysis but on which side is in a stronger political posture. That has significant implications for constitutional interpretation and design.

My first task, though, is to convince the reader that these things are worth worrying about. Historically, these sorts of situations—or near misses—happen all the time. When they do, we abuse hindsight and say, in retrospect, that it was obvious that it would happen; that it was obvious what the proper resolution would be; and that it is all fixed now, leaving us with nothing to worry about. And then the next thing happens, and the pattern repeats. I try to break through that complacency and figure out when and how these traps get created, and when and how we step in them.

My hope is that thinking about these things in advance can help. In some cases, we might be able to fix things to avoid the problem. Congress could simply amend the succession law, for instance.  In other cases, there isn’t much hope for anyone fixing the problem in advance. Here I think that perhaps my book might at least be useful in the middle of a crisis. That’s why the subtitle is “A Legal Guide for Presidents and Their Enemies.”

For more general readers, I want them to enjoy the drama in each chapter as they learn about the legal issues. Prosecuting sitting presidents, two-term presidents sneaking back into office—such issues are just too much fun to leave to the lawyers.

In a nutshell

This book is about adopting a longer-term perspective to understand the world we live in.

In the 1800s a handful of countries, initially in western Europe and lands settled by Europeans, illustrated the potential of market economies to increase output to unprecedented levels.  The formula was no secret and other European countries and Japan were experiencing economic growth by the end of the century.  Traditional societies loathe to increase individual liberty fell behind, while countries which prospered in the Age of Liberty came to dominate a global economy and their empires spanned the globe.

By the early 1900s success was breeding tensions, centered on the distribution of the fruits of prosperity.  Tensions between established and rising economic powers fuelled a war of unmatched battlefield killing, which led to the collapse of dynastic empires centered in Saint Petersburg, Constantinople, Vienna, and Berlin.  In Russia, and later in Germany, new regimes emerged which rejected unfettered capitalism in favor of state-controlled economies aimed at benefiting workers (Communism) or the nation (Fascism).  The market economies with democratic political systems and individual liberties were slow to respond to the challenges, and the 1920s and 1930s were dismal decades for most of them.

Conflict between systems erupted in a war which saw the defeat and discrediting of Fascism by 1945, and in a cold war which ended with the disintegration of central planning and widespread rejection of Communism.  The winner was the market economy, but not the unbridled capitalism of the 1800s.

Successful high-income countries introduced measures to protect those disadvantaged in a market economy (the old, the disabled, the involuntarily unemployed, etc.) and to promote equality of opportunity (through public education and healthcare).  The extent and nature of these measures varied from cradle-to-grave support in Scandinavia to more limited provision in the United States, but all provided basic schooling and accepted responsibility for the destitute.

Outside the high-income countries, the interventionist government policies adopted by modernizing countries in mid-century were jettisoned in the final decades of the century, following the lead of the Asian tigers whose economies embraced “Asian values” but clearly involved resource allocation driven by world prices and a welfare state.

By the end of the century, the idea that the desirable economic system was market-based with government intervention to promote equality of opportunity and of outcomes was dominant worldwide.  The world experienced greater prosperity than ever before, and greater equality than a century earlier within and across countries.  Yet, this is not the end of history.

Many states remain autocratic and unequal, although such regimes have been under increasing pressures for change, especially in Africa and in the Arab world.  Some high-income countries, notably the United States, have experienced growing inequality in recent decades, but relevant political debates are not about abandoning either the market economy or government provision of social services.  The extent of government involvement is debated in the early twenty-first century, focusing on healthcare in the United States and on tertiary education in western Europe.  And aging populations raise concerns about support for the elderly.  But the principle of public policies to mitigate inequality is unquestioned.

The long-run challenges in the twenty-first century will be how to live in an interdependent world.  Disputes between powerful nations cannot be settled by force in a world with weapons of mass destruction.  Uncoordinated national policies will be inadequate to address global warming, epidemics, or unpredictable threats such as stray asteroids.  The consequences of failed states may be felt by others (e.g. Somalia-based piracy) and raise issues of responsibility to protect people from genocide or other crimes when their own state fails to do so (e.g. in Libya).  To enjoy the benefits of the globalized economy will require an Age of Fraternity.

One of the strange things about eradication is how it repeatedly arises, phoenix-like, from its setbacks.

Fred Lowe Soper paradoxically embraced the cause of disease eradication in the 1930s, just as the Rockefeller Foundation abandoned the project. Smallpox eradication was re-born in 1967, just before malaria eradication was given up by WHO. Polio eradication was launched in 1988, just when many public health experts rejected eradication altogether, in favor of concentrating on primary health care.

What explains the continued appeal of eradication, despite the rarity of success?

In a nutshell

States of War examines an age-old conflict within constitutional legal states—to what extent can political authorities violate the law in times of crisis, emergency, or war?

This question has haunted modern states since their founding in the revolutionary era.  Since 9/11, we have had to face this question repeatedly as state powers try to balance the demand for security, protection, and order with the foundational principles of constitutional rule, namely the priority of law and the rights of citizens.

My book challenges the dominant way of addressing the question.

Normally, we separate two different principles when dealing with the problem of emergency and war. We accept that there are legal principles meant to limit and constrain authority, but we also accept that one of the main functions of political authority is to defend the integrity of the political community. In other words, we admit that there are two separate logics at work within the modern state, one that is purely political, justified by an existential imperative of survival, and the other legal, legitimated by basic ideals concerning the rights of citizens. Recent debates over executive power in the US show clearly this division, as some argue for the relative independence of this authority from legal and constitutional restriction while others insist on the absolute sacred quality of individual rights and international law.

My argument is that the division between the political logic of sovereign authority and the legal logic of constitutional rule is artificial.

I show, through a reading of the most important constitutional theorists of the Enlightenment, that at the origin of the modern state, the ideas of sovereignty, law, and right were all deeply intertwined.

True, the logic of sovereignty was inherited from the absolutist states of the early modern period, and yes, the modern constitutional theories first developed in the Enlightenment were aimed at constraining arbitrary authority. However, we have misunderstood these influential eighteenth-century thinkers by emphasizing their concepts of legal constitutional structures (such as the division of powers).

States of War zeroes in on the origin of political community to see what role violence, war, and enmity play in the formation of a legal state. The surprising conclusion is that the most radical concept of political order, one rooted in a basic existential will to survive, turns out to be the foundation for the most radical democratic political order possible.

In a nutshell

Giovanni Batista Belzoni was a towering figure at the beginning of archaeology in Egypt, not for his recognized talents but for his 6’6” height.

Nearly 200 years later he is still despised by archaeologists who see him as a looter and vandal. That he recovered some of the British Museum’s largest and heaviest Egyptian treasures and successfully shipped them down the Nile using only papyrus ropes and a few poles, has largely been ignored. Instead, his sponsor in Egypt, Consul Henry Salt, took most of the credit until he, too, was vilified by his scholarly peers.

Born in Padua in 1778 and trained in Rome as a hydraulic engineer, in 1803 Belzoni arrived in England with skills nobody needed. He therefore earned a living as a circus giant and strong man, playing in theaters and fairgrounds to uneducated and sometimes derisive crowds.

The story of Belzoni’s ten years in Britain was a profitable embarrassment.  Though somewhat embellished by Charles Dickens, it was through the novelist’s eyes that we meet Sarah Barre who had become Belzoni’s wife soon after his arrival in London. She has been said to have been a fairground balancing act, a rope dancer, but later with Belzoni in Egypt she showed herself to be both an artist and a writer. Indeed, the farce and drama of Belzoni’s short life became the tragedy of Sarah’s prolonged widowhood.

In this book, therefore, Sarah’s loyalty to her not always considerate husband, coupled with her prolonged efforts to keep his fading memory alive, becomes an integral part of the story.