A Francocentric Critique of the State

Abstract

We can talk about this book in two closely linked ways: the political one, that criticises the so-called ‘come back to the state’, that some leftists see as an essential tool to break free from neoliberal power, and the historical-analytical one. The historical research on state and sovereignty is the contrastive screen on which the potential political alternative (devised by the authors in Commun), stands out: the plural institutionalism of commons, the bottom-up ‘true’ democracy of self-government of groups and individuals.
The debate on going back to the state is both linked to the collapse of the Third Way Left fully subsumed into the neo-liberal model, and to the neo-institutionalist turn of radical immanence thinking that now seems to accept the need for some kind of neo-istitutionalist organisation.
Some of the anti-neoliberal Left aims to go back to the experience of the state, renewing the political theological paradigm.

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