Concrete Leviathan

The Interstate Highway System and State Building in Modern America

Offers an insightful new way to understand the construction and consequences of the US interstate highway system, expanding and revising the common story.

In Concrete Leviathan, historian Teal Arcadi denaturalizes the interstate highway system, interrogating the ideologies, fiscal mechanisms, and legal tools that led to the construction of a vast and permanent physical infrastructure—and then made it all but impossible to change course. Arcadi argues that the US interstate highway system was built by an unaccountable regime of law and political economy that systematically created and insulated structures of governance. The power of these administrative and physical structures has been such that even when people have mobilized to oppose or try to change them, their protests have tended only to reveal the extent and power of the infrastructural state. 

At the same time, Concrete Leviathan shows how resistance to this infrastructure’s inequities generated new democratic ideas and practices, pointing toward more participatory structures of government and more equitable models of state building. 

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