Challenging State Sovereignty: Mutual Aid or Civil War?
State sovereignty has a complicated relationship to individual rights. There seems to be a general recognition among different political perspectives that the inhabitants of a state are not completely homogeneous and that the internal heterogeneity of a state should be in part the basis for domestic order. Likewise there is broad agreement that peace and security are the prerequisites for human flourishing, although there is disagreement about the degree to which the state is the correct entity to guarantee this peaceful situation. Yet the large size of states needed to provide security in today’s world creates a problem for political identity. Either a large state must enforce a homogeneous political identity for all its inhabitants, or the state must establish both a collective state-centered form of identity as well as the possibility of heterogeneous groupings within the state that do not threaten the identity of the state itself. Threading this needle has always been at the heart of the American project. This issue of Telos looks at recent attempts to think through the U.S. balancing act in maintaining the goal of e pluribus unum through state sovereignty.
Introduction
David Pan
Effective Altruism in between Right-Wing and Left-Wing Anarchisms
Catherine Malabou
Toward a Democratic Theory of Emergency Medical Services: Solidarity, Sovereignty, Temporality
Mark S. Weiner
Can the Precariat Be Organized?: The Gig Economy, Worksite Dispersion, and the Challenge of Mutual Aid
Georges Van Den Abbeele
From Neoreaction to Alt-Right: A Schmittian Perspective
Courtney Hodrick
Notes and Commentary
The Antinomies of Refugee Reason
Michael Marder
Forum on Civil War
America’s New Civil War
Paul W. Kahn
Three Decades of Civil War in the United States: “Don’t Tread on Me”
Timothy W. Luke
The Second American Civil War Is Not Taking Place
Mark G. E. Kelly
Of Civil Wars and Where They Lead: Some Reflections
Greg Melleuish
The Underlying Unity of the American People
David Pan
Reviews
The Burdens of Love and Time
Paul Linden-Retek
