ABSTRACT
The central argument of this book is that the exclusive territoriality of political authority that prevails in capitalist modernity was not itself a product of the emergence of capitalist social relations. While capitalism entails the separation of political and economic power, we cannot derive from this argument an explanation for the empirical fact that the sphere of the political is fractured by territorial boundaries demarcating sovereign spaces. Moreover, I have argued that the separation of politics and economics, and the differentiation of internal and external realms, did not even have the same historical origins. In chapter 6, I have sought to spell out the conceptual and theoretical implications of this argument with respect to our understanding of capitalism and ‘modernity’. In particular, I have argued that the continuing existence of territorial statehood in capitalist modernity must have profound consequences for the way in which capitalism’s logic of process is structured both spatially and socially.
