ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the city is inevitably devalued as an object of political analysis, because the dominant ontology of the political suggests that attention must be focused on the sovereign authority, which is not the city. Sovereign authority inaugurates the political by establishing a domain within which people are ruled and in which rule is contested, from within or from outside. Conventional political understandings entail distinctions between the state and society and one’s own state and other states. The thrust of the modern social sciences has been towards a naturalistic understanding of the human condition, and hence towards explanations of politics and political choices in naturalistic terms. The disciplinary structure of the academy – especially the American academy – anticipated the form of world order that would be produced by the political struggles of the twentieth century. The political analysts who make most of the possibilities of self-government are the contemporary civic republicans.
