Arbitrary state and corporate powers are helping to turn the Internet into a global surveillance dragnet. Responses to this novel form of power have been tepid and ineffective. Liberal critiques of surveillance are constrained by their focus on privacy, security and the underlying presupposition that freedom consists only of freedom from interference. By contrast, (post)Foucauldian critiques rejecting liberalism have been well rewarded analytically, but have proven incapable of addressing normative questions regarding the relationship between surveillance and freedom. Quite apart from these debates, neorepublicans have excavated a third concept of freedom, understood as non-domination. Could neorepublicanism overcome the limitations of liberal and (post)Foucauldian critiques of surveillance? We argue, positively, that neorepublicanism can accommodate much of the (post)Foucauldian analyses while also incorporating a normative critique of surveillance vis-à-vis freedom. We further argue, negatively, that surveillance power has outstripped the capacities of traditional republican institutional responses to domination. We conclude by considering ways in which neorepublicanism can be recalibrated to address the novelty of surveillance power while adhering to the ideal of non-domination. Two ways of addressing the problem are proposed: an offensive, dedicated surveillance antipower and a defensive republican amplification of privacy.

What are sanctuary cities? What are the political stakes? The literature provides inadequate answers. Liberal migration theorists offer few insights into sanctuary city politics. Critical migration scholars primarily address the relationship between sanctuary cities and political activism, a small part of the phenomenon. The historical literature examines continuities between 1970s sanctuary church activism and contemporary sanctuary cities, confusing what is essential to sanctuary churches and what is only sometimes associated with sanctuary cities. Together these approaches obscure more than they reveal. This article suggests a republican account of sanctuary cities. Reconstructing American migration politics from the colonial era onward shows that sanctuary cities have roots in both the colonial republican revolt and the republican principle of freedom as nondomination. That reconstruction reveals much about both sanctuary cities and the federal government’s long-running assault on them. The resulting robust analytical framework clarifies what is at stake in the politics of sanctuary cities: federal sovereignty in migration politics specifically and republican liberty in migration politics generally.

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Hannah Arendt argued that the American Revolution revealed for the first time that all regimes require a reference to an absolute, while the French Revolution revealed that not all absolutes are equal. The American Revolution took as its absolute the act of founding itself, upon which the authority of the constitution could be grounded. By contrast, the failure of the French Revolution to establish an authority stemmed from its reference to the transcendental absolute of the nation. Beginnings, for Arendt, are historically determining. How then are we to explain the present view of authority in Germany which takes as its absolute referent the Holocaust? And how does this inform our understanding of the relationship between absolutes and new foundations? We argue that the key to understanding the German case is found in the particular nature of postwar German memory politics and that authority is not statically related to positive foundations.The need for an absolute manifested itself in many different ways, assumed different disguises, and found different solutions. Its function within the political sphere, however, was always the same: it was needed to break two vicious circles, the one apparently inherent to human law-making, and the other inherent in the petitio principii which attends every new beginning, that is, politically speaking, in the very task of foundation.