A Crisis of Belonging

A Crisis of Belonging Commentary on politics today is concerned with size—the size of superpowers and client states, GDPs and deficits, armies and arsenals. But what’s often forgotten is that the issue of scale in modernity was first about inclusion. For Enlightenment philosophers, this is what separated the moderns from the ancients. From the eighteenth century onwards, albeit slowly, ever more people came to regard government as something they should have a say in—and a right to. It was not...