This lecture will be conducted in person in room 315F and through Zoom. 

For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

In the aftermath of World War II, decolonization and the cold war wrought dramatic geopolitical changes around the globe. In the US, battles were waged over the meaning of ideals such as democracy, equality, and freedom, often pitting those who believed in individual liberty and social equality as mutually reinforcing aspirations against those who prioritized liberty and believed equality would follow. In the midst of such struggles, some individuals concerned with protecting their wealth, their safety, and their freedom from what they perceived to be an encroaching state and a threatening rabble, sought to exit the nation-states to which they belonged and to establish their own independent, sovereign, and private countries on ocean and island spaces. Rarely successful, they nevertheless established a precedent for today’s current exit advocates—from seasteaders to advocates for free private cities, from Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri to anarcho-capitalist architect Patrik Schumacher—who aspire to new forms of colonization and enclosure in the midst of proliferating political and climate crises.

The presentation will be followed by a conversation moderated by Elisa Iturbe.

Raymond Craib is Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke University Press, 2004); The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile (Oxford University Press, 2017); and most recently Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022). 

The in-person event is open to current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff. This event is only open to the public through Zoom. 

View the full Spring 2023 Lectures and Events List.