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On Sovereignty

Forum: On Sovereignty
Edited by David Bates and Dan Edelstein
Volume 2, Issue 2

Political theory is an amphibious beast with one foot in the changing stream of history and another on the enduring ground of human nature and the human condition. Jean Bodin’s theory of absolute and undivided sovereignty was a product of time and place. His Six livres de la République (1576) was written four years after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, during which thousands of prominent Huguenots were killed by the Catholic League a few days after the marriage of Margaret of Valois to Henri of Navarre, a Protestant who later converted to Catholicism when he ascended the...

Volume 2, Issue 2

Indivisibility has long been among the defining characteristics of sovereignty. As Hans J. Morgenthau once stated this point, "sovereignty over the same territory cannot reside simultaneously in two different authorities, that is, sovereignty is indivisible." Sovereignty cannot be divided without ceasing to be sovereignty proper, and precisely this quality of being indivisible distinguishes sovereign authority from other forms of political power.

Volume 2, Issue 2

What happens when the central organizing narrative--of law, of justice, and of the sovereign authority that such concepts delineate--is disrupted or decentered? What happens next? What kind of politics are we left with when such basic organizing principles are removed (however temporarily)?

Volume 2, Issue 2

Following Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, counterrevolutionary writing of the late eighteenth century entrenched itself in opposition to the speculative political programs emanating from revolutionary France. For Burke and his inheritors, such as Joseph de Maistre and Novalis, the driving force behind the “the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle” was not the biological needs of the Parisian multitudes...

Volume 2, Issue 2

Whether or not sovereignty resembles, is founded on, or else opposes itself to paternal authority within the confines of the family has been debated (though not always in those terms) in Western political thought from Plato onward.

Volume 2, Issue 2

In the Spring of 1621, The Office of the Works at Whitehall, the main London palace of James I, prepared “the Banketting house with the History of Abraham for the king to take view of them.” References to this performance have surfaced sporadically in theater histories, but no known play text exists. As John Astington has demonstrated, what the king viewed was not in fact a play but rather a suite of tapestries: ten panels illustrating the life of Abraham, first acquired by Henry VIII in 1543/44....

Volume 2, Issue 2

The longest, most lucid, and easily the most eloquent statement of sovereign power that classical antiquity bequeathed to subsequent political theory is provided by the sovereign princeps himself as he steps forward to introduce himself to a postrevolutionary Roman audience in the prologue of Seneca’s De clementia: