Modern state order claims to be the only genuine order that has ever existed

Evidence

Projects of improvement of this kind contain less of the harshness of the methods of military order I have been describing. But the order they seek to achieve is a similar one. Such projects, no less than the military innovations, typify the new way in which the very nature of order was to be conceived. In modern Egypt, as in every modern state, order of this kind was to claim to be order itself, the only real order there has ever been. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 160

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Mitchell’s compression of a profound epistemic claim — that modern order is not one ordering among others but posits itself as the sole real order — constitutes a genuinely paradigm-level insight about how colonialism legitimates itself.
• XREF: Echoes Foucault’s discourse analysis and the Saidian critique of colonial knowledge production in chapter 1 of this same book.