Land and Sea is a short book of history and political theory by the German jurist Carl Schmitt, written as a narrative for his daughter Anima and published in book form in the early 1940s, with a revised edition following after the war. Its subject is the elemental opposition between land and sea as forces shaping human existence, and its method is mythic and historical at once: Schmitt tells how certain peoples came to live on the water rather than the soil, and what that transformation did to the political map of the world. The tone is unhurried and story-like, but a dense structure of legal and historical reference sits beneath it.
“It was the first, complete, space revolution oo planetary scale, in the true meaning of those words .”
Running through the whole account is a claim about human freedom. Schmitt refuses to treat geography as destiny. A man wholly determined by his medium would be nothing but a ground animal or a fish, and there would be no human history at all, only the programmed behaviour of species. What separates humans from plants and animals is the capacity, in moments of danger or decision, to remake themselves—to be reborn into a new form of historical existence. The movement from land to sea is his great example of that capacity in action, and the book is built to show it happening.
From the Shore to the High Seas
The Whale as a Creature of the Sea
The whale, Schmitt insists, is a genuine mammal—”a fish in virtue of its biosphere”—and the men who hunted it from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries were hunters in a grand style, not mere catchers. That distinction matters for his story. He leans on Michelet’s book on the sea for its tender account of whales’ love- and family-life: the male as the most chivalrous of lovers, the tenderest spouse, the most devoted parent, the most humane of creatures—more humane than man, who exterminates it with savage cruelty. Schmitt notes how mild whale-hunting still was in 1861, when Michelet wrote, though the steamboat and cannon had already reversed the odds and made the whale an easy target; he imagines what Michelet would have made of the industrial extraction of spermaceti and the processing of cetacean carcasses. Since the world war of 1914–1918, “pelagic” catching with ceaseless improvements can no longer be called hunting or fishing at all: thirty-thousand-ton boats with electric gadgets, cannons, grenades, planes, sound and radio detectors and floating kitchens penetrate the Antarctic ice seas where the whale has taken refuge, and dead animals are processed industrially on board. The leviathan has almost disappeared. Only in 1937 and 1938 was an international agreement signed in London to regulate whale-killing and mark out whaling zones to protect what remained.
By comparison the old whale hunters were true hunters, not fishermen or machine-like butchers. They left the shores of the North Sea or the Atlantic in sailing ships or towing boats, trailed their prey across vast expanses, armed with harpoons, fighting a giant that combined astuteness with strength—a dangerous confrontation between two creatures roaming the sea, their element, with all man’s means set in motion by muscular power: oars, sails, the harpoon’s deadly thrust. The whale could capsize ships with a single stroke of its tail and opposed man’s astuteness with a thousand ruses. Herman Melville, himself a mate on a whaler, shows a quasi-personal relationship between hunter and prey, a subtle tie of connivance and hostility that lured man ever farther into the elemental lower depths of maritime existence. Whalers sailed the globe from north to south, Atlantic to Pacific, discovering islands and continents “on the quiet” while following the whales’ mysterious routes; Melville has a sea-comber remark that Captain Cook, discoverer of Australia, writes books about things a whale hunter would not jot in his deck book. Michelet asks who opened the ocean to people and discovered oceanic zones and routes: the whale and the whalers—not Christopher Columbus and the gold-seekers, who noisily rediscovered what fish shoals from Brittany and the Basque country had found before them. Whale hunters, he says, are the highest expression of human courage: without the whale, fishermen would never have abandoned the shores; the whale freed them from the coastline, lured them to the high seas, and so maritime currents and the northern Passages were discovered—”It was the whale that guided us.”
Two Kinds of Hunter and the Dutch Ship
In the sixteenth century two types of hunters appeared at once. On land, Russian trappers tracking fur animals conquered Siberia and reached the Far East overland. On water, whale hunters from Northern and Western Europe, as Michelet justly remarked, opened the world to us—the firstborn of a new elemental form of existence, the first and true “children of the sea.” This period coincides with a technological achievement in which the Dutch were foremost: by 1600 they were undisputed masters of ship-building, perfecting the new sail and new types of sailing ships that replaced oar-vessels and made navigation of the newly discovered oceans possible. About 1595, from Hoorn in Western Friesland, came a new type of vessel with square sails: unlike the older boat, it was not pushed by the wind from behind but sideways, putting the wind to quite different use. Tackle and navigation then improved beyond expectation; the naval historian Bernhard Hagedorn remarks that “the collapse of the medieval navigation looks like a catastrophe”—the great turning point in the history of the relationship between land and sea. Nearly everything possible with the available materials for ships and tackle was done then; the next revolution in ship-building waited until the nineteenth century. Hagedorn thinks scrapping the larger sail and exploiting all the advantages of the smaller one must have appeared a genuine revelation to navigators. The Dutch accordingly became the “haulers” of all European countries and took over the trade of the German Hanse; Spain, though a world power, had to hire Dutch vessels to keep her overseas traffic going.
The sixteenth century also produced a new man of war marking another stage in naval warfare: a sailing ship equipped with cannons firing broadside salvos, turning naval confrontations into long-distance artillery duels undertaken with a highly perfected art of sail handling. Only then could one speak of naval battles, since clashes between crews of oar ships had been but land combats “on board.” The new and complex art of manoeuvring before, during and after an engagement was a radical about-face in naval tactics and the art of sea warfare generally. The first scientific treatise in the modern sense on this new art was compiled by a Frenchman, the Jesuit Paul Hoste, published at Lyon in 1697 under the title The Art of the Naval Armies or Treatise of Naval Evolutions, a critical analysis of Dutch, English and French manoeuvres and battles during the wars waged by Louis XIV against the Dutch. Other French works followed; only as late as 1782 did an Englishman, Clerk of Eldin, join the ranks of the great theoreticians.
England as Universal Heiress
Schmitt then traces the maritime chronology. The Portuguese raced round the world for a century, often along shores; from 1492 the Spaniards took over through the Conquista of America; French Huguenots and the English followed. England set up the Muscovy Company in 1553 as the basis of an overseas policy, enabling her to come level with the other colonial powers; only after 1570 did the English cross the Equator. Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, printed in 1589, was the first practical document attesting the new English world outlook. The Dutch had taught the English whale-hunting and ship-building, yet in the long run the English surpassed all, defeated their rivals, and secured world supremacy based on domination of the oceans. England inherited the sea hunters, sailors, pioneers and discoverers of all European nations; the exploits of Danes, Dutch, Germans and Norwegians amassed into British maritime domination. Other colonial empires persisted—Spain and Portugal kept huge possessions—but lost control of the seas and communication routes. Cromwell’s forces occupied and kept Jamaica in 1655, affirming England’s overall policy regarding the world’s seas and implicitly her maritime victory over Spain. The Netherlands, at its maritime zenith by 1600, was forcefully “continentalized” a century later, compelled to defend itself against Louis XIV and erect land fortifications; in 1689 their stadholder William III of Orange became king of England, took residence on that island, pursued an English policy and ceased promoting any peculiarly Dutch one. France did not follow up the Huguenot maritime impetus, pursued the line of Rome, sided against the Huguenots (the Night of St. Bartholomew in 1572, Henry IV’s conversion), and decided for land against the sea; her maritime potential remained considerable—she could confront the English fleet under Louis XIV—but when in 1672 the king sacked Colbert, his great secretary of trade and navy, the choice for land became irreversible, confirmed by the eighteenth-century colonial wars. Germany’s contribution was squandered in religious wars and the political wretchedness of the Empire.
England’s case is unique, not explicable by comparison with Athens, Carthage, Rome, Byzantium or Venice: she underwent an elemental metamorphosis at an altogether unlike moment, turned her collective existence seawards, and won not only wars and naval battles but a revolution of planetary space.
The Concept of Spatial Revolution
Man’s awareness of space, Schmitt argues, is historically subject to deep perturbations; a plurality of forms of existence corresponds to a plurality of spaces. Skills and professions introduce different environments—city-dweller versus farmer, whale hunter versus opera-singer, airplane pilot—and the differences grow larger among nations and periods. Scientific theories of space may tell much or nothing; for centuries those who conceived the Earth as spheric were thought deranged; the modern specialized sciences—geometry, physics, psychology, biology—each have separate notions, half a dozen notions of space with no conceptual unity, and nineteenth-century philosophy and epistemology leave us in the lurch. Yet the forces of history wait as little for science as did Christopher Columbus and Copernicus: each new breach brings new lands and seas into awareness, changing the spaces of historical existence, new criteria, dimensions, sciences, social systems; nations are born or reborn. Such a redeployment may alter the very contents of the notion of space—a spatial revolution; all important historical changes imply a new perception of space.
Three examples follow. Alexander the Great’s conquests opened the Greeks to a vaster horizon, producing Hellenistic art and culture; Aristotle saw East and West coming together; Aristarchus of Samos, between 310 and 230 BCE, hypothesized the Sun as a fixed star at the centre of the Earth’s orbit; Alexandria became a centre of inventions; Euclid taught there; Hero made technical discoveries there where Archimedes of Syracuse had gone to school; Eratosthenes, director of the Alexandrian Library, anticipated Copernicus by calculating the Equator and demonstrating the Earth’s spheric shape. Yet the Hellenistic world was not great enough for a planetary space revolution: knowledge remained in learned circles, and no world ocean entered its existential reality.
Three centuries later Julius Caesar left Rome to conquer Gaul and Britain, opening eyes to the north-west and bringing the Atlantic within reach—the first step toward the spatial entity now called Europe. In the first century of the Roman Empire, particularly under Nero, the consciousness of profound mutation was so strong that one may speak of a revolutionary transformation of space among leading intellects: the visual field expanded in all directions; wars of conquest and civil wars overhauled space from Spain to Persia and from Britain to Egypt; contact among distant lands and peoples nourished a feeling of unity in a common political destiny; a general from Germania, Syria, Africa or Illyria could be elevated to Imperator in Rome; the isthmus of Corinth was pierced and Arabia skirted on the south; Nero sent an expedition to the sources of the Nile; Agrippa’s map of the world and Strabo’s geography are evidence; the Earth’s spheric shape ceased to be the exclusive knowledge of astronomers. Seneca, Nero’s tutor before becoming his victim, expressed the new planetary feeling: one could sail westwards from Spain’s Atlantic shores and reach India in not too many days; in his tragedy Medea he predicted that Ocean would loosen the bonds of things, Thetis disclose new worlds, and Thule no longer be the bound—a footnote explains Thetis as Achilles’ mother, here goddess of the sea, with another version naming Tiphys, pilot of the Argo.
The Threefold Meaning of Nomos
The argument turns first on a word. The Greek noun nomos comes from the verb nemein, and that verb carries three distinct senses, each of which leaves its mark on the noun. To begin with, nemein means to take—the German nehmen is its kin—so nomos first signifies seizure, and seizure above all of land, though later of the sea as well; in the industrial sphere one speaks correspondingly of the appropriation of the means of production. From taking, the word moves to dividing and distributing what has been taken, so that nomos also names the basic division and repartition of the soil and the order of ownership that follows from it. And finally it means to tend: to usufruct, to exploit, to turn the partitioned land to good account, to produce and consume. Seizing, dividing, tending—in that order—are the three fundamental notions of every concrete order, and Schmitt refers the reader to his own Der Nomos der Erde for the fuller treatment.
Order as Spatial Delimitation
Authentic order, the argument continues, rests on distinct spatial delimitations; it presupposes clear dimensions and a precise division of the planet. Every great era begins with an extensive territorial appropriation, and every important change in the image of the Earth is bound up with a political transformation and a new repartition of the globe. The spatial revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could only lead to an astounding and unprecedented seizure of territory. New spaces seemed endless to Europeans, who treated non-European and non-Christian peoples and countries as abandoned property devolving upon the first occupier from Europe. Catholic and Protestant conquerors alike invoked their mission of spreading the Christian faith—though they might have done that without conquest and plunder—and this was the only motive and justification they offered. Some monks resisted: the Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria, in his lecture on the Indians of 1532, proclaimed that a people’s right to its land was independent of its religious faith and defended the rights of the Indians. That did not alter the global historical reality of European appropriation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the mandate of Christian mission widened into a mandate to disseminate European civilization among uncivilized peoples. Out of such justifications a Christian European civil law was born—the law of the Christian commonwealth of Europe, distinct from the rest of the world. Christian peoples built a “family of nations,” an inter-state order whose civil law rested on the distinction between Christian and non-Christian, or a century later between civilized (in the Christian European sense) and uncivilized peoples. A nation not civilized in that sense could not join the community of states; it was regarded as an object, part of the possessions of a civilized nation, as colony or colonial protectorate.
Fratricidal Wars Among the Conquerors
This commonwealth was no flock of peaceful lambs. Its members waged bloody wars among themselves, which does not undo the historical reality of a shared Christian-European civilization. World history is a history of territorial conquests, and the conquerors did not always support one another; they often opposed one another in bloody, fratricidal wars. What set them apart from ancient occupiers and alien third parties was precisely this: intestine struggles, fratricidal clashes and civil wars are the most gruesome of all wars, and more so when the land was seized in common—the conflict grows more intense the higher the stakes. Here the stake was a new world. In the sixteenth century Frenchmen and Spaniards massacred each other for years most atrociously, particularly in Florida, sparing neither women nor children. Spaniards and Englishmen confronted each other in a century-long bitter war in which brutality reached its limit; neither side had many scruples about filling its ranks, openly or surreptitiously, with non-Europeans, Muslims or Indians as auxiliaries and allies. Each side abused the other as assassins, thieves, rapists and pirates—but one abuse was missing: among themselves, Christian Europeans did not accuse each other of cannibalism. All of this fades before the dominant fact of the collective conquest of the New World by Europeans. The meaning and core of Christian-European civil law, its fundamental order, was the partition of the newly discovered Earth. Among themselves, without much planned deliberation, Europeans were unanimous in treating non-European territory as colonial territory, an object of conquest and exploitation. The age of discoveries might more correctly be called the era of European territorial conquests. Heraclitus had already said it: war brings people together, while law divides them.
Crosses, Coats of Arms, and Legal Titles
Portuguese, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Englishmen fought one another over the division of the new Earth, and not by military means alone—the struggle also ran through diplomatic negotiations and lawsuits over the best legal title. At that stage one could afford to be magnanimous toward the aborigines. A landing party would plant a cross in the ground, carve the coat of arms of its king into the bark of a tree, mark a boulder with the great seal, or tuck an official title between the roots of a tree. The Spaniards favored solemn proclamations informing a band of gathered aborigines that their land now belonged to the Castilian crown. Such symbol-laden gestures were deemed legally sufficient to acquire whole islands and continents; no government—Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch or English—paid any attention to the natives’ rights to the land. The other side of the matter was the fighting among the European conquerors themselves: each would thrust the legal title at hand under the other’s nose and, when useful, invoke agreements concluded with the natives and their chiefs.
England Becomes an Island in the Pregnant Sense
England is an island, but to deserve the name in its pregnant sense it first had to become the carrier and focus of the elemental transition from land to high seas, inheriting the maritime surge of the age. Only by becoming an “island” in a new and previously unknown sense could it conquer the oceans and win the first round of the planetary spatial revolution. The bare geographical fact means little: Sicily, Ireland, Cuba, Madagascar and Japan are islands too, with divergent histories; even continents are islands, as the ancient Greeks knew the inhabited land to be surrounded by oceans. England had been geographically an island since its severance from the Continent—under the Celts, under Caesar’s Roman conquest, under the Norman conquest of 1066, and in Joan of Arc’s lifetime, when the English held a good part of France. Islanders felt they lived in a well-defended redoubt; medieval poems praise England sheltered by the sea as a fortress by its moat, and Shakespeare gives the best expression of this insular feeling—”this precious stone set in the silver sea.” But that consciousness was still land-bound, soil-bound, territorial, expressing a strong terrestrial rooting. It is wrong to think every islander, or today’s Britons, born sea-roamers. The sixteenth-century transformation of a nation of sheep-breeders into a nation of sea children was a fundamental change in the island’s political-historical essence: land would henceforth be looked at from the sea, and the island seen not as a chip split from the Continent but as part of the sea—a ship or a fish. The terrestrial onlooker struggles to see continental space with a maritime eye; everyday language builds its designations from earthly experience, calling the planet “earth” though it might be called “sea,” speaking of maritime “routes” where there are only lines. A ship recalls a floating piece of territory, a “floating extension of the national territory” in international law; a man-of-war a floating fortress; England a fortified castle with the waves as its moat—to seamen these are inexact metaphors of terrestrial imagination, as much floating land as a swimming dog. From a strictly maritime view the Continent is but a shore, a strand with its hinterland; a whole country may look like a shipwreck washed ashore, as in Edmund Burke’s astounding words: Spain is but a whale stranded on Europe’s shores.
The Leviathan Lifts Anchor
Once England opted for an exclusively maritime existence, all her relations with the world, especially with continental Europe, were transformed, and British political standards became incompatible with those of other European countries. Energized by maritime and global supremacy, England, queen of the seas, built an empire spread to the four corners of the planet, thinking in terms of bases and lines of communication. What to others was soil and homeland appeared to the English as mere hinterland; “continental” took on a retrograde connotation and the nations concerned were thought backward. Britain, metropolis of a world empire raised on maritime destiny, would be uprooted, losing territorial character—like a fish able to swim elsewhere: the mobile center of a world empire whose possessions lay strewn incoherently over all continents. Disraeli stated that the British Empire was more an Asian than a European power when looked upon from India; in 1876 he added to the Queen of England’s title that of Empress of India, making plain that British world power owed its imperial character to India. As early as 1847, in his novel Tancred, Disraeli had suggested the English queen set court in India: gathering a powerful fleet, she and her court and ruling elite would move the seat of empire from London to Delhi, finding an immense empire, a first-rate army and considerable revenues. Disraeli was a nineteenth-century Abravanel; some of his opinions about race as the engine of world history, about Judaism and Christianity, were zealously disseminated by non-Jews and non-Christians, and he knew what he was talking about. He felt England, the island, was no longer part of Europe, her destiny no longer necessarily linked to Europe’s; she could free herself and change seats as metropolis of a world maritime empire—the ship could lift anchor and cast it elsewhere; the big fish, the leviathan, could set itself in motion in search of other oceans.
The Zenith and the Hidden Mutation
The age of total, uncontested English supremacy began after Waterloo, which witnessed Napoleon’s undoing at the end of a twenty-year war-like adventure. It continued through most of the nineteenth century and reached its zenith mid-century with the Paris Conference of 1856 ending the Crimean War. The free-trade era coincided with the free expansion of England’s industrial and economic superiority; freedom of the sea and freedom of world trade merged into a single concept of freedom whose carrier and guardian could only be England, and universal admiration and emulation of the English model peaked then. An internal mutation affected the leviathan’s elemental being. It should have passed unnoticed, but the opposite happened: a positivistic age, blinded by the rapid accumulation of wealth, thought it would grow indefinitely toward a millennial paradise on earth. The change was the consequence of the industrial revolution, begun in England in the eighteenth century—first blast furnace in 1735, cast iron in 1740, steam engine in 1768, spinning mill in 1770, mechanical loom in 1786, all in Britain, showing her advantage over every other nation; steamship and railway appeared in the nineteenth century, where England also had the edge. The great naval power simultaneously became the great engineering power, its world supremacy seemingly assured. Earlier she had leapt in maritime existence between the—and there the text breaks off, followed only by the alphabetical index of names, the reference apparatus with which the book closes.
The conceptual spine of the book is the Greek word nomos, which Schmitt unpacks through its root verb nemein: to take, to divide, to tend. Every concrete order begins with seizure—originally of land, later of the sea—continues through division and distribution, and settles into usufruct, the working and consuming of what has been apportioned. Order, on this account, rests on clear spatial delimitation; the start of every great era coincides with a large territorial appropriation, and every change in the image of the Earth brings a political transformation and a fresh partition of the planet. A “spatial revolution,” in Schmitt’s vocabulary, is a shift in how space itself is perceived—not a scientific discovery so much as a change in the lived awareness of peoples, which rearranges their criteria, their sciences, and their social systems. He offers three such revolutions: Alexander’s opening of the Greek horizon, which produced Hellenistic culture but never reached the ordinary citizen; Caesar’s turn to the north-west and the Roman Empire’s first-century sense of planetary unity, voiced in Seneca’s prediction that the ocean would loosen the bonds of things; and the modern one, when Europeans crossed the oceans and divided a new world among themselves.
That last revolution is the book’s real subject, and Schmitt is unsparing about its legal character. The Christian commonwealth of Europe, as he describes it, was never a flock of peaceful lambs—its members waged bloody and fratricidal wars against one another—but they were unanimous in treating non-European territory as an object of conquest. The law of nations they built rested on the distinction between Christian and non-Christian, later between civilized and uncivilized peoples; a nation outside that circle could not join the community of states but became a colony or protectorate, part of the possessions of a civilized power. Even Francisco de Vitoria, lecturing on the Indians in 1532 and defending their rights independently of their faith, did not alter the historical reality of appropriation. The age of discoveries, Schmitt suggests, might more accurately be called the age of European territorial conquests.
The Whale, the Leviathan, and the Making of England
The book’s most memorable figures are the hunters who first left the coastline behind. Schmitt insists on calling them hunters rather than catchers, and he means the distinction seriously: men in sailing ships and towing boats, armed with harpoons, trailing a giant across vast expanses, matching human astuteness against an animal that could capsize a ship with one stroke of its tail. Herman Melville, himself a whaler’s mate, captures the quasi-personal bond between hunter and prey, a tie of connivance and hostility that lured men ever deeper into maritime existence. Following the whales’ mysterious routes, these hunters discovered islands and continents quietly, on the way. Jules Michelet, whom Schmitt leans on heavily, asks who really opened the ocean to humanity and answers: the whale and the whalers, not Columbus and the gold-seekers. “It was the whale that guided us.” In the sixteenth century two kinds of hunter appeared at once—Russian trappers conquering Siberia overland, and the whale hunters of Northern and Western Europe who opened the world by water. These were the first true children of the sea.
The Dutch gave that new existence its technical form. Around 1595, from Hoorn in Friesland, came a vessel rigged with square sails that used the wind sideways rather than pushing from behind; with improved tackle, navigation was transformed, and the naval historian Hagedorn could say the collapse of medieval navigation looked like a catastrophe. The Dutch became the haulers of Europe, and Spain, for all her power, hired their ships. Naval war changed too: the sailing ship firing broadside salvos turned sea battles into long-distance artillery duels, an art first treated scientifically by the Jesuit Paul Hoste at Lyon in 1697.
England’s story is the one Schmitt tells with the most care, and he refuses the easy explanation. Being an island means little in itself—Sicily, Ireland, Japan are islands with entirely different histories, and Shakespeare’s “precious stone set in the silver sea” expresses a land-bound, soil-bound feeling, not a maritime one. The transformation of a nation of sheep-breeders into a nation of sea children was a change in the island’s political essence: land would henceforth be seen from the sea, the island not as a chip split from the Continent but as a ship, a fish, part of the water. From that vantage the Continent shrinks to a shore, and Burke can call Spain a whale stranded on Europe’s beaches. England inherited the sailors and discoverers of every European nation; Cromwell’s seizure of Jamaica in 1655 affirmed a policy aimed at the world’s seas; the Dutch, masters of the sea in 1600, were continentalized within a century, while France chose the land when Louis XIV dismissed Colbert in 1672. Disraeli, in Tancred, even imagined the queen moving her court and fleet to Delhi—the leviathan weighing anchor for other oceans. Schmitt treats this as a genuine myth: a collective mentality about sea power and space, grounded in real events, which reconciles oppositions by narrating them rather than resolving them.
Why the Book Still Cuts
The book’s later pages turn somber. The old hunter, matching himself against a living adversary, gives way to the pelagic factory: thirty-thousand-ton vessels with cannons, grenades, aircraft, and sound detectors penetrating the Antarctic ice, processing carcasses on board, driving the leviathan nearly to extinction—prompting international agreements in London in 1937 and 1938 to protect what remained. The same industrial revolution that began in England with the blast furnace of 1735 and the steam engine of 1768 made the great naval power the great engineering power, and its supremacy seemed assured. But Schmitt notes an internal mutation in the leviathan’s elemental being, one a positivistic age, dazzled by accumulating wealth, mistook for indefinite progress toward a paradise on earth. The book closes with the suggestion that this maritime order, like every nomos before it, was a historical settlement rather than a permanent one—and that the opening of the skies had already begun to challenge the doctrine of sea control that Walter Raleigh had framed and England had embodied for two and a half centuries.
What gives the book its continuing force is the honesty of its central refusal. Schmitt will not let space determine human beings, and he will not let law disguise conquest. His nomos—seizure, division, usufruct—is offered as a way of seeing that every order rests on an original taking, and his katechon, the power that anticipates an outcome in order to delay it, names the recurring political hope that catastrophe can be held back. Whether one accepts the mythic frame or not, the argument that the great political conflicts of the modern age were fought over the division of space, and that the law of nations grew from that division, remains a bracing corrective to histories that prefer to forget the ground beneath the map.
