Tribe and Empire

About the Book

"We are all torn between tribal moralities, which stress differences and dangers, and imperial ethics, which attempt to overcome differences and defuse dangers.  We are all tempted to break--or at least cheat on--the Social Contract."                                                                                                                                              The provocative thesis of Tribe and Empire is that the nation is an unstable halfway house between the paranoid tribe, which sees all other tribes as actual or possible enemies, and the open-ended empire, which sees all people as potential subjects or citizens.  Indeed, the modern nation is made up, on the one hand, of increasingly moralistic tribes from the Ku Klux Klan to the National Organization of Women that have rejected the Social Contract, and on the other, of imperial organizations from Amnesty International to Microsoft that seek to expand the Contract beyond the limits of the nation.                                                                  In order to throw light upon these processes in the modern nation state, the book examines the political development of various North and South American Indian groups from the Social Contract perspective of the 17th century philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

About the Author

Patrick E. Kennon is retired after serving 25 years in the Central Intelligence Agency. Before joining the CIA, Mr. Kennon worked as an interpreter during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, as an oilman in Argentina, and as a sailor in the Caribbean. Mr. Kennon is the author of two nonfiction works, Twilight of Democracy and Tribe and Empire. Although Mr. Kennon published short fiction in Esquire magazine in the 1950s, this is his first book-length work in the genre. Mr. Kennon lives in Falls Church, Virginia.