Book Review: The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France, by Kevin Duong

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720976568
• Date: 01 October 2021
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Author: Yves Winter
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

868 Political Theory 49(5)

argue that the sovereign states system, in leaving discretion over exclusion

and resources to states, has promoted the very environmental and migration

crises Stilz seeks to mitigate. When it comes to migration, for example, sov-

ereign territoriality creates dangerous gaps in membership for peoples ousted

from their home and accepted nowhere. It is not clear that this system can be

revised to erase those gaps. A more radical transformation may be necessary.

Furthermore, on the topic of self-determination, it would be interesting to see

Stilz engage indigenous theorists who see Western-style sovereignty as an

obstacle to (rather than a protection for) the self-determination of historically

dominated peoples.5

The fact that questions remain open is not to the detriment of this work.

Stilz’s book is important not only for the position it so strongly presents

within the terrain of territorial debate, but also for opening new debates that

can and must be broadened to probe the value of the territorial states system.

My sense from reading this book, therefore, is that the debate has only begun.

There is no clearer jumping off point than Stilz’s Territorial Sovereignty.

Notes

1. Glen Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of

Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Leanne

Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through

Radical Resistence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

2. It is surprising that in a book otherwise suffused with attention to the ills of

colonialism, Stilz does not complicate her reading of Grotius, whose theories

justified the imperial ambitions of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

3. Stilz carefully avoids making democracy a condition of self-determination so as

not to exclude indigenous groups and national minorities that do not use typical

Western-style voting procedures (106).

4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt, 1976), 278.

5. For example, Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the

Borders of Settler States (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France, by Kevin

Duong. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, 241 pp.

Reviewed by: Yves Winter, Department of Political Science, McGill University,

Montreal, QC, Canada.

DOI: 10.1177/0090591720976568

The French Revolution not only transformed political institutions and foun-

dations of political right but also introduced new formations of political