THE RISE AND FALL OF THE EUROPEAN NOMOS
PART THREE: SCHMITT'S SPATIAL REVOLUTION
This is the third in what’s anticipated to be a short series on Carl Schmitt’s analysis of what he coined as “the spatial revolution.” For an index to the series, see the first installment, here.
In the earlier two installments to this series we have unpacked Schmitt’s spatial revolution as both a geographic (part 1) and psychological (part 2) phenomenon, which had industrial and cultural consequences. His conception of a new nomos of the earth, arising out of the conflict between land and sea versions of human experience and expectation, entailed the eventual victory of the sea-oriented worldview, with its geographic expansion and conquests.
Schmitt’s major work on the juristic and juridical details of that spatial revolution is his 1950 book, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum.1 Fascinating as that book is in its careful, technical dissection of the evolution of the international law which defined and instituted the new nomos, I’m inclined to think it may be too technically specialist and detailed for our purposes here. (Though, I do reserve the right to reconsider that decision down the road, as we dive deeper into the details of the spatial revolution.)
So for this post I want to focus exclusively upon a broad summary of Schmitt’s assessment of the rise and form and fall of the nomos associated with that spatial revolution. As we’ll see in the next installment to this series, by mid-20th century, Schmitt foresaw a yet newer nomos arising from the eclipse of that older one, the origins of which had been associated with the state and the Age of Discovery. (Though, as ever with Schmitt, there’s always the question of to what degree his biography informed his scholarship.)
To cover all that intellectual territory will require some sweeping summary, so I won’t be engaging in my usual citing of copious, expansive passages as evidence of my claims. You’re just going to have to take my word for much of this.
For Schmitt, a particular nomos, or shorthand for what we might call an institutionalized legal order, is rooted in the concrete facts of a specific use of the land. He points to three categories as relevant here: appropriation, distribution, and production. Every new nomos arises originally with an appropriation of land. Once taken, the land is then distributed or divided up (however deliberate or not) in some manner sustainable under the prevailing conditions. That particular division or distribution, to be sustainable, must be productive. It must be effective at producing a livelihood, sustaining households. It is when such concrete facts are established that Schmitt says we can speak meaningfully of a social and legal order that he’d call a nomos. Consistent with what was discussed in the last post, such concrete facts give rise to specific forms of consciousness, as well.
So the foundation of any new nomos begins with land appropriation – whether through migration, occupation, colonization, or military conquest. Schmitt observes, for instance, that even Karl Marx, so indigent over the primitive accumulation that underpinned the emergence of capitalism2, and despite his universalist appeal to justice, nonetheless imagined that more just world arising out of a new nomos rooted in a new land appropriation. That was exactly what was entailed in his vision of a collectively conscious and organized working class seizing control of the “means of production.” And from there he envisioned yet a new distribution of the land (collective ownership of factories, farm, railways, etc.), with a new system of self-managed production.
For Schmitt, in legal terms, this would have been a perfectly legitimate new nomos, and by no means a transcending of the legal parameters of nomos. A new appropriation, if maintained through a sustainable distribution and production, entailed a new law, and constituted a new nomos. For Schmitt, these were the facts of the matter.
One might suspect that the spatial revolution of the Age of Discovery, driven as it was by the turn-to-the-sea, may have entailed a completely different kind of nomos, given the characteristic inability to demarcate the boundaries of space within the ubiquitous fading horizons of the open sea (see here). And undoubtedly, for Schmitt, the new spatial consciousness, arising from the triumph of sea-oriented thinking, did change the ways in which land (and land appropriation) were regarded. Again, the details of this change are the central analytical pillar of The Nomos of the Earth. However, as much as the new sea-orientation embodied such changes, the fundamental fact of land appropriation remained the core of any nomos, including that which arose from the sea-driven spatial revolution of the Age of Discovery.
It was in this context that arose the European public law (Jus Publicum Europaeum) of his book’s title. This new public law was grounded in the Westphalian system of the European sovereign state and Schmitt depicts the latter as a response to the vicious and annihilative religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. This new equilibrium of international law, at least as applied to Europe, served to bracket warfare and neutralize its most vicious aspects.
Rather than a transcendent, spiritual threat that needed to be decisively eradicated, as per the religious wars, under the new system of state wars a legal expectation – which he characterizes as resembling a formal duel – is established. Within this new system the legitimacy of each party is honored, and war is pursued by terms of reciprocal acknowledgment of legitimate interest and conflict, under the watchful eye of other European nations. This arrangement prevailed in Europe says Schmitt for 300 years.
However, this very same nomos regarded land outside of Europe in an entirely different light. In Schmitt’s own words: “In the perspective of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, all land on the earth belonged either to European states or to those of equal standing, or it was land free to be occupied, i.e., potential state territory or potential colonies.” In a sense, we might see this nomos as a kind of continental psychic displacement, in which a strict system of honor-bound statism can thrive due to the displacement of its more savage and unconstrained aggression into the sea-based world of open land appropriation.
In Schmitt’s analysis then the Jus Publicum Europaeum is defined by a melding of the antithesis of (grounded) land and (free floating) sea into the foundation of a globalized European international law. (Schmitt frequently and specifically uses the ostensibly anomalous phrase “European international law,” emphasizing that while it was applied internationally, it was so applied through European power and serving European purposes.) Each of those elements, land and sea, was legally defined by its own unique character – grounded or free floating – and the new legal order, this European public law, prevailed precisely in its effectiveness in maintaining the balance between these contradictions. It was the sustaining of a system built precisely upon the holding together of that irreconcilable tension which characterized this new nomos of the earth.
And as we’ve seen, the off-shoring of the most ruthless European conflict into the open space of the free sea allowed for the maintenance of a stable state order within terrestrial, continental Europe. Within the continental context, “the political” could prevail, in which the opposed combatant is regarded politically and militarily as a legitimate enemy, rather than an illegitimate inhuman. (Schmitt of course did not believe that war could be transcended, and in a sense didn’t believe it should be. Where there was conflict there would be war, and – as we’ll discuss in the next post – the only prospect for a world without conflict was a universalist world government, in which war would only end in “the peace of the graveyard.”)
That very freedom of the sea, integrated into the new nomos, though, eventually gave rise to a free-for-all among European powers, within this new revolutionary space, which set out to conquer and thereby appropriate all non-European lands in the name of their own state. Indeed, Schmitt implies at one point that the very boundlessness of the sea gives rise to nihilistic and chaotic propensities. He favorably quotes one historian as stating that due to its unconstrained openness, the sea gave rise to “liberation from moral and legal ties.” And Schmitt points to the failure of Roman law to deal with the increasing importance of the sea, precisely because law and crime are presumed to refer to some particular place, some specific property. But what can it mean to refer to place or property upon the infinite horizon and unconstrained flow of the sea? (This, incidentally, is why Schmitt was so interested in dissecting the nature and function of the pirate.)
To a significant degree, all this chaos (we might even say anarchy) is tamed by England. We’ve already discussed in earlier posts Schmitt’s perception of England as the pioneering, revolutionary sea power, which for its own self-interest promoted and defended the freedom of the seas, so I won’t rehearse those arguments here (see instead here and here). He attributes England’s unique role here not to its much cited position as an island, but rather to its relative detachment, at the key historical moment, from continental war and politics.
It is true that the new nomos involved numerous European powers appropriating extra-European lands all over the world. And this indeed was the substance of that nomos in action. However, from Schmitt’s perspective, each of the other European powers, due mostly to their political and military entanglements upon the continent, faded in importance for explaining the establishment of this new nomos.
In contrast, England’s relative insulation from the continent enabled it to carve out a unique international law from this extra-continental anarchy of the open, free sea. And if we’re to understand what for Schmitt was the contemporary world, and the dilemma it faced – that encrustation of the previously mentioned balancing tension between grounded land and free floating sea, which constituted the new nomos of the earth – appreciating the role of England was essential. However, as mentioned, we’ve touched upon this role in previous posts, so we’ll leave that discussion here – at least for the moment. Though we will recall the terms of that nomos as we consider Schmitt’s assessment of the world historical options laying ahead, in the next installment to this series.
By the early 1940s, however – not only the occasion of the publication date of Land and Sea, but apparently when he was writing Nomos of the Earth – Schmitt saw that nomos, which had sustained European stability, and indeed the stability of the state itself as the hegemonic political institution, as unraveling. A key dimension of this new outlook for Schmitt was indeed a perception that the age of the state had been eclipsed. It’s probably worth mentioning in this regard that, as is often the case, Schmitt’s biography seemed tied into this theorizing.3 As discussed in an earlier post to this Substack (see here), this emergent skepticism about the legitimacy of the state appeared in Schmitt’s critique of Hobbes, which itself seems correlated with Schmitt’s own personal experience of having been deeply shaken by his growing perception of the illegitimacy of the National Socialist state.
This new ambivalence was not only a result of his own personal persecution by the Schutzstaffel, but was driven at least as much by what he perceived as the lawlessness of the Night of the Long Knives, during which many innocent conservatives – including personal friends of Schmitt – were murdered in the orgy of lawless violence. And while Hitler did publicly acknowledge such excesses, Schmitt was deeply disturbed by the Fuhrer’s failure to take actions to re-establish justice. Schmitt, long the enthusiastic Hobbesian, was forced to acknowledge that, if the legitimacy of the state was dependent upon the maintenance of a secure order, such cannot be assumed on the part of the state, and in such case any obligation to Hobbesian obedience on the part of the state’s subject was removed.
So, it was in this context, the Hobbes book being published in 1938, that by the early 1940s we find Schmitt turning against the state as the foundational predicate of a secure and stable order. Still, for all that, Schmitt did have his legitimate historical and theoretical reasons for proposing the eclipse of the age of the state and the European juridical order so closely associated to it. Schmitt’s experience under the National Socialists may have served a benefit of shaking him free of his (what I consider to have been always an ill-advised) devotion to the Hobbesian state (see here), but that reorientation did manifest in a recognition of real historical forces that exceed the nuances of his own biography.
Reminding the reader that this review of Schmitt’s position entails a good degree of streamlining and summary, in broad strokes, we can point to three main developments which Schmitt identified as undermining the order of international law rooted in the Jus Publicum Europaeum. These are the erosion of discrimination in determining particular state legitimacy; the hegemony of free trade doctrine and practice; and the military relevance of the emergence of air power. Each of these developments were elements in a gradual transition from a European-rooted nomos toward a pervasive universalism – in Schmitt’s words “an empty normativism of allegedly recognized rules” – that dissolved any notion of spatially grounded (i.e., particularist) international law. Each of those three developments are briefly summarized below.
As observed above, the nomos that arose from the sea-powered spatial revolution was grounded in a distinction between the states of Europe and the rest of the world. It was this organization of land and sea which served to bracket European continental warfare into a civilized, relatively gentlemanly contest between mutually acknowledged enemies, and so neutralizing the annihilative dispositions which had characterized the preceding wars of religion – with those dispositions now subject to being off-shored to the extra-continental lands, claimed by the European states. That system required particular modes of legal discrimination, organization, and recognition of different kinds of peoples. Such discrimination, organization and recognition, though, became impossible once the community of civilized states started to expand beyond the European continent.
As a matter of empirical fact, as specific non-European countries achieved certain levels of industrial development and military capacity, it became impractical and even impossible to exclude them from the standards of international law based exclusively upon geography. This development was facilitated by the willingness of such emerging states to adhere to the standards of this European international law. For instance, as Schmitt observes about Japan – one of the earliest non-European states to be so recognized: “In its war with China in 1894 and its victorious war with a European Great Power (Russia) in 1904, Japan had demonstrated that it would abide by European laws of war.”
Japan though was only the tip of the iceberg in this expansion of legitimacy, or sovereignty, recognition within the standards of European international law. At the same time, such a tendency had effects which subverted the very foundations of that nomos’ particularity. At the most basic level, that nomos and the land appropriation which had underpinned it was based upon certain distinctions between peoples.
It had been precisely the distinction between the civilized Europeans, on the one hand, and the barbaric (half-civilized) or savage (uncivilized, or wild) people, on the other hand, which had provided the legal and moral grounds for the land appropriation that made the entire extra-continental world a legitimate territory of annexation to the sovereign authority of European states. The expansion of state sovereignty and legitimacy to non-European states created a logical tension with that conceptual organization of the world’s people which was ultimately unsustainable. To quote Schmitt:
That a family or community of European states and nations suddenly opened the doors of its house to the whole world was no mere quantitative expansion and enlargement, but rather a transition to a new phase. At first, of course, it was a headlong leap into the nothingness of a universality lacking any grounding in space or on land.
At least, though, from the perspective of an observer desirous of sustaining the Jus Publicum Europaeum, this expansion of sovereign state acknowledgment continued to sustain – in a sense was even based upon – the integrity and legitimacy of the modern sovereign state. Such was not to be the result of the second development in the decline of that nomos which we’re examining here: free trade doctrine and practice.
Free trade doctrine demanded the universalization of space, and thereby eroded the particularistic ordering of space intrinsic to the nomos of European international law. A doctrine that demanded unhindered mobility and standardized commodification and commercializaton of all property (including land), money, capital, and labor was by definition on a collision course with the boundaries of the sovereign state. Either the state decided what crossed its borders or else it was not sovereign. And the demand of free trade and free markets was a precise attack upon just such state authority over borders.
And that erosion of state border sovereignty (and so effectively sovereignty, tout court) was not the only assault of free trade doctrine upon the particularism of the sovereign state. As that doctrine became increasingly hegemonic, at least since the Cobden Treaty of 1860, it inevitably entailed a submission of the state to a predicate of internal, domestic organization and policy. For, from the perspective of the free trade zealot, it would be near meaningless to provide “open” borders while simultaneously imposing domestic policies that made free trade and free markets impossible within those borders.
So, the free trade doctrine did not merely demand access to every place, but likewise required a homogenization of public policy across all such places. Quoting Schmitt on this point:
In the idea of a free global economy lay not only the overcoming of state-political borders, but also, as an essential precondition, a standard for the internal constitution of individual member states of this order of international law; it presupposed that every member state would establish a minimum of constitutional order. This minimum standard consisted of the freedom – the separation – of the state-public sphere from the private sphere, above all, from the non-state sphere of property, trade, and economy.
So, from Schmitt’s perspective: the combination of new states reaching levels of industrial development and military capacity that was impossible to ignore, entailing their integration into the global order, disintegrating previous (European-oriented) in-group and out-group distinctions between states and nations; as well as the influence of the 19th century hegemony of free trade doctrine and practice; merged to allow a new universalism, against the particularism of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Furthermore, the emphasis on free trade and movement not only demanded the erosion of state borders, but also an endogenous homogenizing of constitutional order, whereby public law and policy facilitated freedom of movement and commodification of property, money, labor, and trade. This free trade public policy homogenization has contributed to the universalism of global homogenization.
For Schmitt, the surrender of the Eurocentric nomos to this universalism of homogenized commercial space and eroded state sovereignty – entailed in the concessions to free trade doctrine and nondiscriminatory state recognition – constituted effectively a rejection of the very categorical conditions for its ordered international law. And the consequences of that rejection would prove devastating: “With this rejection of international law, Europe stumbled into a world war that dethroned the old world from the center of the earth and destroyed the bracketing of war it had created.”
In this way, from Schmitt’s perspective, the utter industrialized carnage of WWI and even more WWII was directly traceable to the collapse of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. And indeed, the same effect has been embodied in the subsequent demonization of Hitler, the Nazis, and often even of Germans, with the replacement of the “the political” with what Schmitt sometimes calls “humanitarian war” – in which to oppose the side of “justice” is to be inhuman. Making such an observation of course detracts not at all from recognizing the genuine anxieties, as well as crass opportunism, which often informed such attitudes, as I’ve discussed elsewhere (see here). But neither does any of that detract from Schmitt’s core point about the dehumanizing impulse of “humanitarian wars.”
However, as noted above, that was not the entire story, and in fact it was the experience of WWII that highlighted the other centrally important development in the collapse of the old European nomos: the rise and impact of air power. The importance of air power for Schmitt can be identified along three verticals. First, it simply unleashes military forces which the existing international law, grounded we’ll recall in holding together the irreconcilable tension between land and sea, is simply incapable of addressing. And this problem extends to the inability to deal with air war through the established laws of either land war or sea war. He makes numerous points along these lines; for our purposes I’ll just unpack one that seems distinctly relevant to the present discussion.
For all the indubitable differences between land war and sea war, what they do have in common – distinguishing them from air war – is that they presume a direct confrontation between the combatants’ military forces. They approach each other, whether at sea or upon a battlefield, and engage in mutual, immediate belligerence. This face-to-face character in war is intrinsic to both land and sea warfare. Initially, in WWI, there was some similarity in air war, as embodied in the famous aerial dogfights among the flying aces. This all changed though, in April 1937, with the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. This is widely considered to have been history’s first case of saturation bombing of a civilian population. The tactic was used on other occasions during the Spanish War, and became the standard, routine air war tactic of WWII.
While there was a long history of military forces destroying the civilian infrastructure – and often civilians in the way – from Schmitt’s perspective, this application of such tactics by air created an entirely new legal and analytical problem. Land war implied a confrontation that entailed eventual conquest, and likely occupation. While there are always legal violations in war, the international law of war saw in these developments a set of legal obligations between the occupier and the occupied. Even with sea war, acts of bombardment or blockade had the potential to lead to surrender and occupation, invoking such legal obligations. From Schmitt’s perspective, no such condition arises from air war.
Also, an occupation arising from sea war, which remained part of sea war, would be restricted to the coast, port, town, which had been subject to the sea force’s actions. As such, that occupation could still be managed and (ultimately) enforced from the sea. No such condition pertained to air war; air war itself could never lead to occupation, with the ensuing legal obligations arising from occupation. Soon as an airplane landed, it became an (ineffective) instrument of land war, and had lost its tactical advantage. The only effective tactical implementation of air war, as Schmitt could clearly see writing Nomos of the Earth toward the close of WWII, was massively destructive bombardment. To quote Schmitt: “the only purpose and meaning of an air raid is destruction.” As such it never lends itself to the legal obligations arising from land war, though, as we’ve just seen, applicable to conditions of sea war.
Independent air war allows neither the one nor the other side a possibility to establish a relation. The airplane flies over and drops its bombs; low flying pilots dive down then fly up and away; both execute their destructive function, then immediately leave the scene, with all that has befallen men and materials on the ground, whose fate is in the hands of the sovereign of the surface state.
And hinted at here is the second vertical in which Schmitt identified the corrosive effects of air war and power upon the by then eclipsing nomos. It is an observation to which Schmitt mostly alludes, but seems immanent in his analysis: no less than free trade doctrine, with its demands for the bulldozing of the state’s restrictive borders, the airplane, which simply flies in over whatever battlements such a state may presume to mount in defense of its borders, also increasingly makes a mockery of the effective sovereignty of the Westphalian state. Such an ostensibly sovereign state, that all through history had defended its land borders with walls and trenches, and its coastlines with forts and cannons, faced an entirely unprecedented threat from airplanes that descended from the clouds to rain terror and destruction upon any area of the state’s country, entirely dictated by the act of the attacker.
And this tendency of air war to further erase the conventional markers of the state’s sovereignty likewise anticipates the third vertical of importance in understanding its undermining of the international law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. This tendency is captured in a seemingly offhand observation by Schmitt: “from the air, and with respect to air raids, the surfaces of land and sea are indiscriminate.” While such an observation may appear banal at first blush, it in fact cuts to the very core of what’s key in the role of air war exploding the very fabric of the nomos created through European public law.
That nomos, recall, had as one of its (if not its) central feature the holding together of the irreconcilable tension between grounded land and free floating sea. It was based upon that tension, and that tension’s melding into European international law. Air war erased all of that. As Schmitt observed, for a man looking into the skies to guard against attack, it mattered not whether he stood upon firm land or freely floated upon the sea. Whatever difference – and a very real one it was, with major consequences – existed between the level of friction experienced by merchants and generals attempting to maneuver on the land compared to the sea, it was utterly obliterated by the degree of relative frictionlessness experienced by those maneuvering in the air. (A relative frictionlessness obviously manifest by the speed that military force could travel by sea compared to on land, or in the air compared to either.)
That development resulted in the elimination of the very real spatial advantages of the seafaring nations. Previously it had only been they who could travel the world free of the many obstacles and frictions that hindered travel on the land. As a consequence, the division between land and sea nations, and indeed land and sea as distinctive elements of human organization (and consciousness) – upon which the dominance English sea power was erected – dissolved into the infinite skies. In the future, Schmitt concluded, due to this new dimension of power and war, original land powers, even landlocked ones, could also become globally dominant. The tension between land and sea could no longer define the nomos of the earth.
It was precisely this tense integration of land and sea into international law that had established the Eurocentric nomos – with its Wesphalian maintenance of the friend-enemy conception of the political upon the continent, and avoidance there of descent into the annihilative barbarity experienced during the religious wars – that air war now rent at the seams. In Schmitt’s words, the airplane “had nullified the surface of the free sea and, thereby, the antithesis of mutual enemies.”
It’s worth addressing here the likelihood that at least some readers may object that from the perspective of 2025 Schmitt was obviously wrong about all this. We still have states everywhere; they remain the organizing principle of international institutions and conflict. If Schmitt were here today, he may indeed acknowledge that at least the form of the state has proven more resilient than he might have anticipated in the 1940-50s. However, I’m not sure how wrong he really was.
On the one hand, he could rightly say that without genuine sovereignty, the formal appearance of a state constitutes little more than persistent, if ossified habits of thought and conforming ornamentation in support of such habits. If sovereignty — a term I acknowledge that is subject to much definitional dispute — refers at minimum to control of one’s border, currency freedom, and the ability to wage war without any one else’s approval, how many sovereign entities actually exist in 2025? Arguably, only the U.S. and China, with the possible inclusion of Russia (maybe more likely to be included depending upon how the Ukraine war winds up). And indeed, it’s not even clear all three possess complete sovereign power in all three areas. But these are the three closest to meeting such a standard.
Additionally, Schmitt emphasized the effects of universalism and homogenization in subverting state sovereignty. I’m sure there are empirical metrics to measure such factors. I can certainly say anecdotally that since I first started travelling around the world with my backpack, in ancient days of the 70s, the degree of global homogenization has been remarkable. Though, much of the obvious manifestations of such seem more directly the result of factors not so much focused upon by Schmitt: cultural penetration through globalized communication technology: e.g., film, television, and the internet. (Though, I think Schmitt would have been right to consider these factors as the logical outcome of a kind of fusion between free trade and air power, but that’s a conversation for another day.)
So, while Schmitt, visiting us today, might conclude that at least the form of the state may have proven more resilient — even if as a mostly vacuous hologram — his deeper point about the eclipse of the Westphalian state as the organizing and legitimizing predicate to a global nomos was clearly borne out by the political realities of the international order. The state of the Jus Publicum Europaeum is indeed eclipsed, regardless of habits, rituals, and formalities to the contrary. And, of course, as we’ve discussed, the risk that that eclipse presented for the benefits of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, and its melding of land and sea, was the return of annihilative war and unleashing of global chaos.4
To conjure that risk though leads us into a further story of what Schmitt, writing in the mid-20th century, saw as the likely directions for the next, new nomos of the earth. In the following installment to this series on Schmitt’s spatial revolution, we’ll look at those potential directions, consider the influence of Schmitt in that regard upon another major thinker attracting much attention today, Alexander Dugin, as well as examine the implications and meaning of a recent current affairs kerfuffle through the lens of Schmitt’s prognosis and Dugin’s reimagining of that prognosis.
So, if you don’t want to miss that exciting next installment, but haven’t yet, by all means, please…
And if you know someone who you think may find some value in this exploration of the spatial revolution, please…
Meanwhile: Be seeing you!
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006).
See part VIII, Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, ed. Paul North, trans. Paul Reitter (Princeton (N.J.): Princeton University Press, 2024).
One way of interpreting this tendency would be to accuse him of unremitting opportunism. But it may be worth pondering whether some thinkers might act as kinds of weathervanes who, being acutely sensitive to the shifts of their zeitgeist, serve to translate those shifting facts into theoretical articulation. If such a thing exists, Schmitt may be a top candidate as the poster boy for this breed of theorist. I think that’s a prospect at least worth considering.
Though, from what I’ve read, Schmitt never says it with the clarity and certainty one might hope, it seems perfectly reasonable to interpret the techno-barbarity of WWII, and the industrial scale genocide of the Holocaust, as manifestations of such a return and unleashing. A perhaps useful book in this regard, which may down the road make an appearance in this year’s exploration of the spatial revolution is Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2002).