April 2015

The fight over the past: the politics of official history

One of the peculiar traits of modern nation-states is that they try to collapse together a variety of things into one, politically-effective bundle: 1. The population is reframed as the ‘body politic,’ which Hobbes portrayed as a literal metaphor in 1651. 2. The spatial territory is considered an integral part of the ‘nation.’ Symbolically, the

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The regime is…us

In my Cities in a Global Society course, I have been pressing the point that we need to rethink organized political power. The classic English/German worldview is that there is a thing called “the state,” which is separate from “the people.” This is effective rhetoric for elections, especially for candidates who want to portray themselves

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