Mortal Citizens and "We the People"

We have given to the frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchers, and our alters.

—Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France¹

In the United States, every eight seconds, there is a baby born in America, and it might be an anchor baby and a baby born to an illegal mother…every time a baby is born, an illegal walks across the border into the United States. As our population grows, half of it is an illegal population.

—Congressman Steve King (R–IA), Congressional Record, July 17, 2006²

Burke's famous invocation of political community patterned on familial relations of intergenerational blood ties and sanctified by religion offers a vivid contrast to the individualistic image repertoire of liberalism, as do Congressman Steve King's less-eloquent diatribes against the threat of Mexican "anchor babies." The diverse and sometimes dissonant traditions of liberal political thought are unified by their common rejection of familial models of public authority and corporatist conceptions of collective identity. Thus, the temple of Locke's social contract is built on the ruins of Filmer's Patriarcha; Kant's legal cosmopolitanism repudiates the collectivist parochialism of national sovereignty; Paine's bourgeois radicalism is elaborated as a rejection of Burke's hierarchical traditionalism; and Mill's utilitarian defense of representative government rebukes the organic cultural nationalism of the nineteenth century.

Jacqueline Stevens's provocative new book explodes this familiar portrait by arguing that liberalism has relied upon disavowed principles of patriarchal authority and exclusionary birthright citizenship at every step of its historical development, right up to contemporary debates over US immigration policy in which she has been an outspoken and insightful participant (see her weblog, here). "Nationality, inheritance, and marriage," Stevens writes, "indicate a so-called liberal public's warm embrace of practices inconsistent with the liberal ethos—a form of subconscious hypocrisy" (185). The costs of this hypocrisy, as detailed in the book, are very high indeed: systematic warfare and mass violence, stateless populations without legal protections, vast and growing inequalities of wealth and resources. Cataloguing these terrible costs, Stevens urges "so-called liberals" to live up to their own principles of individualism, equality, and political majoritarianism, no matter how dramatically doing so might conflict with the deep presuppositions that institutionally, conceptually, and affectively organize contemporary political life.

States without Nations envisions an alternative political world—one without nations, inheritance, marriage, or landed property—by targeting the complex tangle of laws, policies, and narrative supports that sustain these institutions and sanction the violence and injustice carried out in their name. Within the citizenship rules of every nation, Stevens argues, is a violent and exclusionary nationalism; behind familiar guest worker programs and intestacy laws lurks the death-dealing logic of the internment camp. By elaborating these underlying connections and identifying their common origin in immortalist fantasies of intergenerational kinship communities—the etymological root of "nation," Stevens reminds her readers, is the Latin nasci, meaning "birth" (42)—Stevens hopes to convert readers to a new frame of reference, wherein prevailing forms of political affiliation appear in the same repulsive light as slavery, making the work, among other things, a bracing call for a "new abolitionism" (19). While the book's learned and wide-ranging arguments do not always convince, they invariably inform and provoke, startle and rouse; States without Nations is a stunning work of radical theoretical imagination.

The central charge that modern liberalism has historically relied upon what it cannot normatively avow—in various forms of violence and inequality—is a familiar one in contemporary political theory. Political theorists frequently engage arguments detailing the illegality and decision that underwrite the constitutional rule of law, for example, or examine how the...