Book Review: Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge, by Cressida J. Heyes

Abstract

does the idea of state personality extend in the case of a sovereign member state within the European Union, of which it is a member: could the EU itself be held accountable for actions of its authorized representatives, who themselves are states, rather than citizens? The common practice of holding states responsible—a key feature of international liberal order—has long been misunderstood through a misleading analogy drawn from individual responsibility. Impressive in its breadth, Leviathan on a Leash averts the human-state analogy trap and presents masterfully a novel theory of state responsibility, where, in short, states are responsible for the actions of their authorized representatives. As long as our idea of state responsibility rests on a misguided form of collective responsibility, we will not be able to understand properly some of the basic features that make the international order liberal. After all, what is liberal about a practice where all citizens collectively are made to suffer through sanctions because of their leaders’ corruption (think, for example, of the “odious debt” of $28 billion the Philippines owed foreign creditors after the fall of its dictator Ferdinand Marcos)? What we need, as Fleming superbly shows, is a conceptual framework that can determine when to apply collective rather than individual responsibility, and how states can be held collectively responsible. The irony is that in order for us to leash our leviathan we need to update our outdated understanding in the twenty-first century by a return to the seventeenth century.