ABSTRACT
In very general terms that nevertheless speak to complex, contradictory and very dense historical achievements, prevailing accounts of modern politics tend to be expressed in two distinct discourses: those concerned with possibilities and necessities within the sovereign state and those concerned with necessities and possibilities elsewhere. Most modern scholarship tends to divide internal or domestic forms of politics from external, foreign, international or global politics. systematic structures of inequality and unfreedom is hardly novel. Such claims shadowed the articulation of a universalizing story about 'the expansion of international society' for most of the twentieth century. It is, however, a suspicion that has arisen with considerable force since the end of the Cold War confrontation between bipolar hegemons, each with their own imperial subordinations. Unfortunately, the modern political imagination has become much too comfortable with the assumption that verticality offers a reasonable solution to problems of horizontality.
