Conceptual Foundations of Sovereignty and the Rise of the Modern State

This chapter explores the conceptual foundations of sovereignty in connection with the rise of the modern state. The political practice of the state as a civil association governed by a sovereign ruler arises in medieval Europe, but its first theoretical articulation is achieved in early modernity, by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. The task in what follows is to explain the conceptual connection between sovereignty and the modern state originally identified by Bodin and Hobbes, and its subsequent development in the ideas of the classical contractarians Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. The thrust of the argument is twofold: (1) that sovereignty is not a property of private persons, but a constitutive feature of the modern state as a public institution, and (2) that the sovereign state is a juridical institution as opposed to a structure of domination or of economic allocation. The analysis begins with a sketch of the discourse of sovereignty followed by a detailed examination of Bodin’s and Hobbes’s accounts of sovereignty and state. It proceeds with two brief sections on John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose aim is to elucidate two basic distinctions: state (Hobbes) vs. government (Locke), and state sovereignty (Hobbes) vs. popular sovereignty (Rousseau). The penultimate section discusses Kant’s idea of a state animated by the rule of law, which requires—in a constitutionalist manner—the exercise of sovereignty to be bound by morally justified legal rules. The chapter concludes with a sketch of external sovereignty which applies to the relations of states.