The actualist State-as-superior-entity theory reduces individuals to abstractions
Evidence
Thus one could imagine a recruit explaining to the recruiting officers the theory of the State as superior to individuals and demanding that they should leave in liberty his physical and material person and just enrol that mysterious something that contributes to building that national something known as the State. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1658
Categorization
- XREF: This caricature of the State absorbing individual persons parallels how nationalist imagined communities subordinate real bodies — a bridge into how the nation-state’s abstract claims override actual individuals, relevant to the statelessness and exclusion themes in the toolkit. — connects to: Behaviorist accounts of persons fail by omitting their transcendence-transcended principle; All understanding is necessarily reductive abstraction; Datafication may disrupt autonomy at the level of self-boundedness itself — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 500 (+3 more)