Within legal debate, the state and the body are discourses at once apparent and buried. Amongst international legal scholars, the state is all-consuming while the body is unimportant whereas, in the domestic sphere, state ascendency precludes the study of its existence, while the body as the liberal autonomous rational agent of consent is the principal preoccupation. Neither of those constructs bears much analysis. Trends within global, comparative and transnational legal debate endeavour to deconstruct the state and the body, but often do so in ways that cannot challenge, subvert or disrupt the character of either body or state, or to consider their intimacy in patterns of historic conditioning. In particular, we are so inured to ideas now considered common sense that tracing how perceptions of law, legitimacy and authority were naturalised via the body and state is very difficult. Within the canon, the male White body, as Epstein argues, remains the core and the naturalised state the subject of the modern world (p. 261). From this premise, Epstein undertakes a fascinating journey through security, liberty and property, making plain the processes of naturalisation so dominant that they now go unremarked. Epstein makes visible the concerns of the state and the body at the centre of law and politics.While this is not a traditional book review, I begin by noting the quality of scholarship and writing in the Birth of the State. Do we need another deep dive into Locke and Hobbes? Epstein's answer is an emphatic 'yes', and the book amply shows what may be achieved in doing so. Moving from security to liberty and finally to property, the book deftly sets out how ideas that were not obvious or natural, and indeed were in some incidences alien to the medieval ideas that preceded them, were articulated so as to become naturalised. It does so by embracing the work of Foucault, Butler, Skinner and others, but not uncritically. The book shows the limitations in embracing one theoretical view and how a pluralism of critical approaches unbeholden to one methodology, particularly when examining the history of ideas, often achieves more than the sum of its parts. Naturalisation is at the core of book, namely how ideas become naturalised so that we no longer see them for what they are, constructs, but regard them as a priori matters of objective fact.Reading Birth of the State from another disciplinea process that requires care and attention to disciplinary, linguistic and methodological contextstwo of the book's features come to the fore: first, the methodological choices and, second, the substantive arguments and where they are amenable to disrupting legal debate. Foucault, Agamben, Haraway and others are usefully and thoughtfully embraced amongst some legal scholars. Epstein fruitfully puts such scholarship to work in combination with her close textual analysis of Hobbes, Locke, Grotius, Suarez, Pufendorf, Bacon and others, bringing to the fore the processes of naturalisation of key concepts related to the state and the indivi...
