Abstract

HAMMAR, Björn. Citizens between State and Empire. Desafíos [online]. 2015, vol.27, n.2, pp.145-165. ISSN 0124-4035.  https://doi.org/10.12804/desafios27.2.2015.04.

The internal world is closely related to how the bonds between the citizens and public power are conceived. Aspects that in modern political thought often have been attributed to an external order associated with the sovereign state can nonetheless be located in the internal world of the citizen. Problems associated with the foundations of political order, such as fear, insecurity and divergence, do not only stem from external forces located outside of the citizen, but also from her internal world, which means that political contingency comprises that world. Thomas Hobbes returns once and again to the need to control or minimize the contingency of the internal world within the sovereign state. This paper seeks to widen the perspective dominated by sovereign statehood in modern political thought, by inquiring how the internal world is conceived in relation to the tension between state (or republic) and empire as the foundation of political order. The historical and theoretical co-existence of states and empires has not necessarily been contentious or of mutual exclusion, as modern republicanism frequently claims. If the link between republic and empire is an intrinsic part of political order, questions remain to be addressed about how this link is related to the inner world of the citizen. How the citizen and herself is defined in relation to modern states and empires both feed upon and have consequences for conceptions about territoriality, government and sovereignty.

Keywords : State; empire; territoriality; sovereignty; citizen; will; memory; internal world.

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