Whether there has been a transition to something new in what it is possible to think remains to be seen. In the absence of such a transition, we are unlikely to see significant changes in the conditions of rule. If indeed capitalism is a spent force, then economic decline will accelerate and material inequality will increase. Short of a complete collapse, established conditions of rule will be reinforced—the mighty frame ever mightier, the international society of modern state-nations shows no signs of fading away. As migration dilutes blood ties and multiplies languages in daily use, nations depend all the more on territory for their social coherence and emotional appeal. That sovereignty is more difficult to locate spatially only illustrates the effects of modernist functional differentiation, which does not displace space or overlay it so much as penetrate the immediacy of place, every place, stealthily, by making itself indispensable.