![]() ![]() The second is the ordered and civilized world of the European system of sovereign states, where politics is supposed to be artificially stabilized and disobedience is transformed in the extraordinary event of revolution. The first is the wild and conflicting space of the colonial world, where disobedience and disturbance are (potentially) an immanent condition of politics, and power operates in the form of the government over an unstable and conflicting society. The other strategy, which constitutes Locke’s most original spatial contribution to modern political theory, is the division of the world into two qualitatively different political spaces, each one governed by its own logic. The first, and most famous, is contractualism, the revolutionary idea that politics is the artificial product of free agreement among equals, able to transform a naturally wild and disordered world in a political space populated by sovereign states. Two fundamental theoretical strategies characterize this process of reterritorialization of politics. Now, from a spatial perspective, modern theory of sovereignty can be considered a victory of Hondius’ conception of the world over Ortelius’ (and Piscator’s), the titanic effort of European political thought to contain and supersede the sensation of «displacement», or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, the «deterritorialization» of politics caused by the disturbing and uncanny «discovery» of politics’ natural movement. Most importantly, the centrality of the Atlantic Ocean has disappeared, split and shadowed by the two impressive terrestrial spaces of Europe and the colonial world. Thanks to the incorporation of the ancient oriental enemy into the old world, Europe is again big and strong: a great power on earth. Here, the earth is clearly divided into two worlds, the old and the new, confronting each other as «equals». The same is true for the other «Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis», created in 1630 by Hendrik Hondius. However, its title expresses the complete awareness of this new and modern representation of the earth and of the complexity of a world that has suddenly become «atlantic». To be honest, Piscator’s map was less new than what its title suggests, since it was based on the model of the truly innovative 1570 Ortelius’ Orbis Terrarum. In addition, Europe – often represented in the medieval and early modern cartography as a queen ruling over the known world – has been reduced to a peripheral and quite small portion of this transatlantic world linked together and dominated by the sea. It is on the contrary the very core of the map, the hub of the incredibly wide network of communication that has become the world. ![]() Here, the Atlantic Ocean is not represented in the traditional ptolemaic style as the end of the world, the western edge of a world which is essentially European and terrestrial. ![]() One is the 1639 planisphere by Claes Janszoon Visscher’s (also known as “Piscator”), one of the most prominent and celebrated cartographers of the XVII century. To better understand the spatial implications of these two competing modern visions of politics, we can preliminary look at two very famous and coeval XVII century Dutch world maps, both entitled Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica ac Hydrographica Tabula and created, as their title suggests, with the revolutionary ambition of producing a «new map of the whole earth», a new representation of the world, of its «land» and of its «sea». «Sea», on the contrary, as the spatial principle of a maritime conception of politics, in which politics is viewed as fluid, and order is shaped in an endless, changing, and conflicting movement of powers and agents. «Land» will be considered as the spatial principle of a terracentric conception of politics, in which politics is viewed as static, and order exists only when conflict is neutralized. For this goal, I will use the spatial concepts of “Land” and “Sea”, as examples of two modern political logics. ![]() In the following pages, I will venture in an Atlantic reading of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. ![]()
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