This chapter develops an original account of political ethics, which details not only what it means to belong to a political community but also the normative contribution that politics makes to the lives of private individuals. Advancing discrete conceptions of authenticity and reasonableness, it discusses two fundamentally political duties that we owe to those who share our communities with us: duties that partly define our membership within those groups and inform the ethical value of politics as a discrete form of human activity. It also describes two ways in which politics enhances our ethical lives in instrumental terms, articulating a conception of political action that foregrounds its objective value. This argument forms the normative core of 'statehood as political community', the conception of state creation advanced within the first part of the overall text.

Protecting individual rights is a core feature of democratic constitutionalism. The centralization of the means of coercion gave rise to the Hobbesian dilemma, the fear that this enormous power might be abused unless it be effectively controlled. In addition to dividing power among different branches of government or sharing it between the federation and its units, constitutions have fortified individual rights with judicial review and enforcement mechanisms against the executive branch to rein in state power.

Proposing a collective right to effective self-government sits oddly with a vision that pitches free individuals against an all-powerful state. Such a right can, however, be justified on two interrelated grounds. First, in the absence of effective protection by a state, individual civil and political rights remain empty declarations. Stateless people, Hannah Arendt has taught us, are the most vulnerable; they have no legal rights and no way of seeking protection as a matter of right.

The aesthetics of the self as inextricably linked to an unruly affective economy are explored in Chapter 5 with respect to Mustafa Sa’eed, the protagonist of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. I also highlight the novel’s subtle intertextual arrangements and literary echoes which are part of a larger symphony of mirrorings that form a recurrent principle ramifying at different levels of the text. I track the various references to Othello, Heart of Darkness, A Thousand and One Nights, and texts of the Arab Nahda (renaissance) that are widely interspersed throughout the novel. Finally, I examine Mustafa Sa’eed’s motivation toward self-authorship and the ability to fashion his own identity autonomously and in complete control both of its contingent processes and of their final product. He does this through the deployment of exoticizing orientalist stereotypes, which are rendered completely redundant when he encounters his wife Jean Morris.