Eighteenth-century state theory framed statelessness as irrational and insecure

Evidence

By the eighteenth century the reason of state came to presume that the modern state was inevitable and permanent. That it may suffer an occasional crisis (economic in terms of recessions or depression — an interesting psycho-economic conflation, political in terms of revolutions or wars) attested only to the conceived irrationality of statelessness, to the insecurities of living without or outside the state. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 26

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘reason of state’ presumption of permanence and the conflation of economic and political crises as indices of statelessness’s irrationality.
• XREF: Connects to the law-merchant and social-capital readings about how statelessness was treated as a threat to order; also resonates with Milgrom’s argument that institutions shore up stability. — connects to: State-phobia today parallels the eighteenth-century phobia about despotism. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 512; the MOC “The Violence That Builds: How Modern Order Is Forged, Not Broken, by Force”

Related

• State-phobia today parallels the eighteenth-century phobia about despotism. (similarity 0.85)
• Racial states are inherently violent, not merely exercises of power (similarity 0.78)