An explanation of the meaning of “territory”, illustrated in its historical, social, economic and political context from the times of Cleisthenes to today’s pathological “anti-cities” and mutilated rural areas, as the dynamic unity of humanity as transformative agent and nature as abstract totality, and its significance for the “anti-developmentalist critique” that seeks to reunify the these two aspects of the world in a two-pronged struggle to restore the emancipatory nature of the city (the agora, “city air makes one free”) and the salutary aspects of rural life (the commons, etc.), a struggle that goes by the name of “territorial defense”, the pivot of the modern social revolution.