Introduction

The opening page of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Diary of a Bad Year addresses the topic of our book—namely, changing the construction of the state. The first paragraph of the chapter titled “On the Origins of the State” reads:

Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that ‘we’ … participate in its coming into being. … If … we accept the premise that we or our forebears created the state, then we must also accept its entailment: that we or our forebears could have created the state in some other form, if we had chosen; perhaps, too, that we could change it if we collectively so decided. But the fact is that, even collectively, those who are ‘under’ the state, who ‘belong to’ the state, will find it very hard indeed to change its form.

(J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year. New York: Penguin, 2007, p. 3)