This book reexamines the legitimacy of the democratic nation-state in a time of unprecedented human migration by exploring the relationship between foreignness and sovereignty in political theory. Drawing heavily on Derrida, Epstein challenges traditional theories of sovereignty as self-identicality, arguing for an alternative understanding of foreignness as an originary, constitutive, and ineliminable structural feature of sovereignty as such. After arguing that both modern liberalism and conservative communitarianism tend to conflate demos with ethnos, Epstein emphasizes Thrasymachuss central role in Platos Republic by meticulously unpacking the complex, contradictory relationships among guests, hosts, foreigners, citizens, friends, and enemies in that dialogue. He then turns to a multichapter examination of sovereignty in the social contract tradition, arguing that, for Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, political society is founded on a fear of foreignness that is to be mitigated by the sovereigns efforts to unify its members around a common identity. Sovereignty, however, is always already constituted by foreignness, thereby calling for the (non)concept of the foreign sovereign. Building on Kants cosmopolitan right to hospitality, Derridas autoimmune democracy and unconditional hospitality, and Behabibs discourse ethics, Epstein introduces the foreign citizen, putting the itinerant migrant at the center of any future democratic cosmopolitanism. * CHOICE *
