A genealogy of sovereignty

Abstract

Passing through centuries, the concept of sovereignty has been carved out as the bearer of all that which modern political science is about, and constitutive to all that which modern politics can be known as. Sovereignty, whenever presented as a general concept or a property of individual states, is already a given to experience, semantically or empirically. This complicates the proceedings of political science inquiry into the nature of its objects. This paper is not an attempt to answer the question of what sovereignty is. Rather, it is a presentation of the conditions of knowledge that provide sovereignty with substance, or make it knowable. It is the story of a concept by genealogical inquiry. As it is described here, the history of sovereignty resists a stable and teleological interpretation, highlighting epistemic discontinuity. This history refuses to fit sovereignty neatly into delimited contexts, and seeks instead larger discursive wholes, even as they appear in a different garb than the ones more commonly found in politics and academia. The history presented in this paper dates back to the Middle Age, and from there it discerns how the source, locus and scope of sovereignty change with time and space. This translates into a chronological series of cumulative discourses, whereby sovereignty is distributed downwards from God to king, and then from king to people. This paper finally concerns itself with history itself. Authority and power, sovereignty and legitimacy, are anachronistically employed and frame, by the aid of canonical texts, legitimate rule and supremacy within the modern state. These claims are disentangled and contextualized to reflect the conditions of knowledge of each of the periods discussed