BIGSTATE
The Two-Headed Leviathan
The twenty-first century has found its Leviathan. It has two heads. We are its body.
We are living with the political map of a world that no longer exists.
We vote. Governments govern. Laws are passed. Institutions remain standing. And yet, more and more people share the same unsettling feeling: power is slipping away from us. The forces shaping our lives seem to operate elsewhere, at a speed our political institutions can no longer match.
BigState argues that this feeling has a cause: power has changed form.
The modern state is no longer the self-contained sovereign imagined by classical political theory. States and systemic megacorporations have become so deeply interdependent that neither can fully exercise power without the other. From this interdependence, a new political form is emerging: BigState — a two-headed Leviathan whose heads are the state and the megacorporation.
This is not a book about Big Tech. It is a theory of power in the twenty-first century.
Moving across geopolitics, political theory and our everyday experience of democracy, Asma Mhalla maps how this new architecture of power is transforming sovereignty, war, freedom, citizenship, our relationship to reality — and ultimately our ability to shape the future.
Because the future itself is becoming a political battlefield. Those with the means to build it can set its trajectories before saturated societies have even had time to choose them.
What happens to citizens, nations and democracies when the world changes faster than the institutions designed to govern it? And when it becomes increasingly difficult to know where the state begins and where it ends, what remains of democratic sovereignty?
BigState gives readers a name for the transformation already under way — and a map for navigating it. It is an intellectual tool for recovering agency in an age of permanent acceleration, saturation and confusion.