This book explores how formal-legalism, as the dominant paradigm of explanation, has sought to explain the phenomenon of secessionism among its practitioners as a problem for the modern state. This study bears how these practitioners have, over time, described, defined, and proposed to solve secessionism and related political problems within the logic of their paradigm. In the process, the book reconstructs the formalist worldview and the practitioners' fundamental presuppositions which, to them, render comprehensible and meaningful the occurrence of events, like secession, as well as means of dealing with it. More significantly, the book exposes a debilitating flaw of formal-legalist paradigm as it fails to account for other principles of mobilization in political and social life that defy formal-legal rules such as those based on race, ethnicity, language, culture, and material factors. Narrow adherence to textual sources and the literal approach, have led formal-legalists to miss, willfully ignore, or endorse the paradigm's strategic association with state power, evolving since the dawn of the Enlightenment. Formal-legalism has lent itself amenable to the interests of the state and to the variable construction of the meaning of the law devoid of original spirit and universality but conforming with the specific interests of the state or, for that matter, the prevailing American empire, both spatially and temporally. Accounting for this anomaly, the historical materialist perspective is considered, with appropriate historical and contemporary illustrations, as a relevant explanatory alternative to the now-obsolescent formal-legalist paradigm. With the assumption that, indeed, economic and material considerations such as those demanded by the dominant class elements within the state underlie the rationale for the state, formal-legalism has evolved from one that initially provided a presumed objective view of society to one that has subjectively become an essential part of the cultural suprastructure that allows these elements to command the state as a principal tool for labor- and value-extraction during what is popularly known as contemporary neoliberal globalization.

This book looks at facets in the history of capitalism from the Enlightenment period, through the emergence of the American Empire in the Pacific, and to the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. This re-telling of history is done by drawing from the works of E. San Juan, Jr. (henceforth, San Juan), considered arguably one of the great contemporary cultural and literary critics of our time. In this author's view, San Juan's lifetime of works offer a living documentation of, among others, the history and thought of the modern world highlighted by the rise of capitalism through the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization, and shepherded to its hegemonic status by what stands today as the preeminent empire of the United States. The book underscores the symbiosis between contemporary capitalism as an economic system based on accumulation on the one hand, and the American imperial state on the other, just as it revisits the colonial project that was carried out in capitalism's wake, the violence and subjugation inflicted on its victims, and how this colonial project has morphed into a new form of colonialism (or neocolonialism) maintained and enforced through the rules and institutional mechanisms of what is popularly known as neoliberal globalization that also provides the ideological and legal rationale for the commodification and the ultimate grab of the global commons reminiscent of the classical, albeit cruder, form of colonialism.

This book looks at facets in the history of capitalism from the Enlightenment period, through the emergence of the American Empire in the Pacific, and to the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. This re-telling of history is done by drawing from the works of E. San Juan, Jr. (henceforth, San Juan), considered arguably one of the great contemporary cultural and literary critics of our time. In this author's view, San Juan's lifetime of works offer a living documentation of, among others, the history and thought of the modern world highlighted by the rise of capitalism through the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization, and shepherded to its hegemonic status by what stands today as the preeminent empire of the United States. The book underscores the symbiosis between contemporary capitalism as an economic system based on accumulation on the one hand, and the American imperial state on the other, just as it revisits the colonial project that was carried out in capitalism's wake, the violence and subjugation inflicted on its victims, and how this colonial project has morphed into a new form of colonialism (or neocolonialism) maintained and enforced through the rules and institutional mechanisms of what is popularly known as neoliberal globalization that also provides the ideological and legal rationale for the commodification and the ultimate grab of the global commons reminiscent of the classical, albeit cruder, form of colonialism.