The purpose of this article is to investigate one of the most interesting and debated issues within the philosophical dis-cussion about politics: the metaphor of the body politic and its relation with the theory of sovereignty in contemporary political theory. After an opening section, which proposes a brief sketch about the origin of the body politic within phi-losophy (especially in Plato’s and Aristotle’s contributions), the article provides a theoretical insight of such a theory, by dealing with (...) three of its definitions: Kantorowicz’s “king’s two bodies”; Hobbes’ Leviathan and Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. The article aims at presenting some arguments to de-fine these three perspectives, by examining – in the last sec-tion – how this paradigm has evolved into the more complex and articulated theory of the rule of law in contemporary democratic societies. (shrink)

This volume is a sequel to the author's earlier work on the development of European theories of sovereignity and constitutionalism. Professor Franklin here explains a major innovation associated with the English Civil Wars. It was only now, he shows, that there finally emerged a theory of sovereignity and resistance that was fully compatible with a mixed constitution. The new conception of resistance in a mixed constitution was to enter the main tradition via Locke, who stood alone among major writers (...) of the 1680s in holding that the effect of tyranny by any constituted power, even by the King alone, was entire dissolution of the government and the reversion of power to the general community. When this familiar position is read against the background of preceding constitutionalist theory, the Second Treatise reveals a new dimension of novelty and historical significance. (shrink)

This article examines the interplay between contemporary algorithmic security technology and the political theory of the state of exception. I argue that the exception, as both a political and a technological concept, provides a crucial way to understand the power operating through machine learning technologies used in the security apparatuses of the modern state. I highlight how algorithmic security technology, through its inherent technical properties, carries exceptions throughout its political and technological architecture. This leads me to engage with Theodor (...) Adorno’s negative dialectics to interrogate the question of ‘ground truth’ in machine learning. I conclude that most machine learning technology asserts identity between itself and bourgeois reality – and thus inherently reinforces and reproduces the relations of domination entailed in that image of the world. However, space still exists for machine learning to operate within spaces of political non-identity, or exceptions to the bourgeois totality, and aid in liberatory politics. (shrink)

Overview of the concept of the sovereign individual -- Personal sovereignty as a natural psychological state in human development -- Human development theories -- Philosophical basis of the right to individual sovereignty -- The philosophy of Jose Ingenieros in Argentina, 1913 -- Recognizing that society, church, government, and corporations are mostly fraudulent, coercive, and corrupt -- Our avoidant-defensive posture : a moral or practical decision? -- The desire to live life as we wish : the need to be (...) genuine -- Summary of my theory on individual sovereignty. (shrink)

This article reassesses Samuel Pufendorf's understanding of sovereignty and of the Holy Roman Empire. I argue that the form of the polity theorized by him should be comprehended in light of his adoption of the faculty psychology of Francisco Suárez. Suárez's was a conception of the life of the mind which, Pufendorfmaintained, also operated at the level of the 'composite moral person' of the state. It is true that the sovereign's is the only will in the state that counts (...) politically; but the state has an intellect too, and this may be located in an institution separate from the sovereign. Sovereign will can only function according to the scheme of efficient causality of which faculty psychology forms a component, and thus political absolutism, in which a singular and uncontrollable will is all, is not a necessary feature of Pufendorf's political theory. Moreover, this facultative conception of sovereignty is designed to pertain just as much to composite polities such as the German Empire as to more simple polities. (shrink)

Julian H. Franklin, scholar of constitutionalism in the late sixteenth century, has extended his researches into the late seventeenth century with this fine work on Locke and Locke’s immediate sources. Franklin’s book is short, concise, well-focused and carefully argued. It is also thought-provoking to a degree one would not expect from the modesty or historicity of the subject. Controversy over this problem of political rhetoric and science, once heated while lives and fates were involved, is now cold, and the problem (...) no longer seems to be ours. Franklin follows the reasoning of past thinkers and deftly joins in when he can, providing for us an exemplary model of political theory on the quiet: he makes old arguments relevant to us without forcing them and he detaches us from our alleged necessities without resorting to silly hypotheses. (shrink)

Resumen: El artículo discute el componente kantiano en la teoría democrática deliberativa. Parte sosteniendo que Kant no solo incorpora derechos individuales sino que también la idea de soberanía popular. Este pensador considera la democracia, pero un sistema de principios tiene prioridad normativa respecto de la práctica de autolegislación colectiva. Después, el escrito muestra que la teoría democrática habermasiana elabora un argumento similar al kantiano. Por tanto, no reconstruye el balance entre derechos y democracia como pretende sino de forma similar a (...) como lo hace Kant.: This article discusses the Kantian component in the theory of deliberative democracy. It begins claiming that Kant not only incorporates individual rights but also the idea of popular sovereignty: This author values democracy; however, a system of principles has normative priority over the practice of collective self-determination. The text later shows that Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy elaborates a Kantian justification. Thus, it does not reconstruct the balance between rights and democracy as it claims to do; it rather builds an argument similar to Kant’s. (shrink)

Julian H. Franklin, scholar of constitutionalism in the late sixteenth century, has extended his researches into the late seventeenth century with this fine work on Locke and Locke’s immediate sources. Franklin’s book is short, concise, well-focused and carefully argued. It is also thought-provoking to a degree one would not expect from the modesty or historicity of the subject. Controversy over this problem of political rhetoric and science, once heated while lives and fates were involved, is now cold, and the problem (...) no longer seems to be ours. Franklin follows the reasoning of past thinkers and deftly joins in when he can, providing for us an exemplary model of political theory on the quiet: he makes old arguments relevant to us without forcing them and he detaches us from our alleged necessities without resorting to silly hypotheses. (shrink)

A picture of sovereignty holds the study of politics captive. Captives of Sovereignty looks at the historical origins of this picture of politics, critiques its philosophical assumptions and offers a way to move contemporary critiques of sovereignty beyond their current impasse. The first part of the book is diagnostic. Why, despite their best efforts to critique sovereignty, do political scientists who are dissatisfied with the concept continue to reproduce the logic of sovereignty in their thinking? (...) Havercroft draws on the writings of Hobbes and Spinoza to argue that theories of sovereignty are produced and reproduced in response to skepticism. The second part of the book draws on contemporary critiques of skeptical arguments by Wittgenstein and Cavell to argue that their alternative way of responding to skepticism avoids the need to invoke a sovereign as the final arbiter of all political disputes. (shrink)

Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, Political Theology develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial ...

Recent discussions about global justice have focused on arguments that favor the inclusion of political and social rights within the set of human rights. By doing so, these discussions raise the issue of the existence of specific rights enjoyed exclusively by citizens of a given community. This article deals with the problem of distinguishing between human and citizen rights. Specifically, it proposes a new concept of citizen rights that is based on what I call ‘the stockholder principle’: a principle of (...) solidarity that holds within a specific country. This concept, the paper goes on to argue, is compatible with a broad idea of human rights defined by international law and enforced according to territorial authority. The stockholder principle is further compatible with the psychological concept of citizenship based on a specific collective identity and it leads to fair consequences at the domestic and global levels. (shrink)

Using the Western tradition of metaphysical and political thought as a backdrop, Critique of Sovereignty (a work in 4 volumes) re-examines the concept of sovereignty in order to better understand why our ethical values and technical capacities often seem so divorced from our lived realities. On the one hand, ostensibly self-enclosed entities like the nation-state and the person are rhetorically bolstered as sites of technical agency and/or moral responsibility. On the other hand, these same entities appear fragile -- (...) if not purely fictional -- in relation to ever ongoing tidal processes such as the migration, diffusion, and conglomeration of bodies, capital, ideas, etc. While some of our institutions might work some of the time, they always seem to work differently than we like to think they do. Accordingly, the forging of more humane institutions might very well entail if not require ways of thinking that strive to undo the self-imagined binds, exceptions, and sureties of thought for the sake of embracing a continuity with all that withers, decays, and falls away. Book I, "Contemporary Theories of Sovereignty," compares the varied interpretations of sovereignty given by a range of 20th-century political theorists (Maritain, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Agamben, Hardt, and Negri) with Jean Bodin's initial outline of the concept, rendered at the outset of modern political thought in the 16th century. The analytic framework of sovereignty encountered in these comparative readings provides an initial point of departure for unfolding a method of critique appropriate to the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is an ideal starting point for a critique of the deadlocks between thought and reality for a simple reason: it doesn't actually exist. When it serves as a guide to action, sovereignty may be regarded as a particularly captivating fantasy. The closer it appears, the further it recedes, and, too often, the more vigorously it is pursued. (shrink)

The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was always divided and contested. In this article I argue that Foucault offers a competing account of sovereignty that underlines such features and is thus more historically apt. While commentators typically assume that Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty is borrowed from the classical theory, I demonstrate instead that he (...) offers a sui generis interpretation, which results from the application of his general strategic conception of power to sovereignty itself. In construing sovereignty through a “matrix” of civil war, Foucault thus deprives it of the absoluteness traditionally attributed to it. Instead, he views sovereignty as constituted by conflictual and mobile power relations, a precarious political technology that deploys violence to restore its authority. I also motivate Foucault’s contention that popular sovereignty remains fundamentally continuous with the absolutist sovereignty it succeeds, insofar as it masks and thereby perpetuates unequal power relations in conditions of social conflict. According to Foucault, sovereignty is not a fact of power but a contestory claim, a discourse whose mutability helps to explain its persistence today. (shrink)

In Principes de Politique (1815), Benjamin Constant offers a blueprint for later liberal attempts to retain a commitment to popular sovereignty, while moderating its absolutist tendencies and associations with arbitrary political power. This paper examines some notable tensions, still relevant today, in Constant’s domesticated liberal concept of popular sovereignty. These tensions, I contend, all point to the conclusion that Constant’s project of limiting popular sovereignty by appeal to a sacrosanct domain of rights rests on a liberal interpretation (...) of the general will, which is in fact constitutive for the enjoyment of individual liberties. Section 2 argues that Constant’s location of popular sovereignty in the legislative general will, as determined by elected representatives, does not overcome the problem of the potential arrogation of the popular will by a partisan minority. Section 3 then examines Constant’s views on rights and the implications of his acknowledgement that the enjoyment of liberties depends upon the institutional guarantee provided by constitutional enactment. Finally, in section 4, I demonstrate that Constant’s valorization of individual self-development is inseparable from an idea of political liberty which reflects the priorities of a liberal elite. (shrink)

The article examines recent theories of legal and constitutional pluralism, especially their adoption of sociological perspectives and criticisms of the concept of sovereignty. The author argues that John Griffiths's original dichotomy of “weak” and “strong” pluralism has to be reassessed because “weak” jurisprudential theories contain useful sociological analyses of the internal differentiation and operations of specific legal orders, their overlapping, parallel validity and collisions in global society. Using the sociological methodology of legal pluralism theories and critically elaborating on Teubner's (...) societal constitutionalism, the author subsequently reformulates the question of sovereignty as a sociological problem of complex power operations communicated through the constitutional state's organization and reconfigured within the global legal and political framework. (shrink)

The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol are the main legal documents governing the movement of refugee and asylum seekers across international borders. As the number of displaced persons seeking refuge has reached unprecedented numbers, states have resorted to measures to circumvent their obligations under the Convention. These range from bilateral agreements condemning refugees to their vessels at sea to the excision of certain territories from national jurisdiction. While socio-economic developments and the rise of the worldwide web have led (...) to deterritorialization of vast domains of the economy and the media which enable them to escape from state control, territorial presence, whether on terra firma or on vessels at sea which are functional surrogates for territorial sovereignty, continues to be the basis for the entitlement to human and citizens’ rights. We are facing a dual movement of deterritorialization and territorialization at once, both of which threaten the end of the 1951 Convention. This article is an exercise in non-ideal theory which, nonetheless, has implications for a seminal question in ideal democratic theory as to how to define and justify the boundaries of the demos. If the demos refers to the constitutional subject of a self-determining entity in whose name sovereignty is exercised, regimes of sovereignty, including those which govern the movement of peoples across borders, define the prerogatives as well as obligations of such sovereign entities under international law. The period ushered in by the 1951 Convention was such a sovereignty regime which today may be nearing its end. (shrink)

Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, _Political Theology_ develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Focusing on the relationships among political leadership, the norms of the legal order, and the state of political emergency, Schmitt argues in _Political Theology_ that legal order ultimately rests upon the decisions of the sovereign. According to Schmitt, (...) only the sovereign can meet the needs of an "exceptional" time and transcend legal order so that order can then be reestablished. Convinced that the state is governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict, Schmitt theorizes that the state exists only to maintain its integrity in order to ensure order and stability. Suggesting that all concepts of modern political thought are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt concludes _Political Theology_ with a critique of liberalism and its attempt to depoliticize political thought by avoiding fundamental political decisions. (shrink)

Despite the historical implausibility of contemporary commitments to a sovereign state-centric geopolitical imaginary, these commitments are indeed in force. Unfortunately, though, contemporary political theory and political philosophy are unable to account for the momentum of the sovereign state-centric geopolitical imaginary.The author claims that much of International Relations theory is a symptom of, rather than a serious analytical engagement with, this imaginary. He then provides an account of sovereignty as conceptually contradictory, exposing sovereignty as caught in a (...) transcendental deadlock wherein its conditions of possibility are at once its conditions of impossibility.Sovereignty is discussed as necessarily incoherent, leveraging the claim that sovereignty must be understood through the ill-fated attempts to instantiate it historically – attempts which, due to their conditions of possibility, are incessantly incomplete and thus ever repeated through domestic and foreign policy making. (shrink)

Moderation and liberalism are different and in some cases antagonistic concepts. In recent years, the view that Sieyès’s idea of constituent power is a moderate and liberal rendering of sovereignty has gained acceptance in intellectual history and constitutional theory literature. This claim is based on the premise that radical and illiberal readers of Rousseau’s idea of sovereignty, such as Robespierre and the Jacobins, were opposed to representing the general will (volonté générale). Thus, constituent power as the exercise (...) of power by extraordinary representatives to draft a constitution would be a liberal attempt at political moderation in the French revolution. In contrast to this liberal reading, my analysis shows that Sieyès’s idea of constituent power is an illiberal attempt at political moderation. Against moderate liberal theories, constituent power demands that the extraordinary representatives of the constituent assembly must will, deliberate, and act as if they were the people themselves. These representatives have absolute powers and the mandate to create a constitution but also the imperative to perceive and mirror the sovereign will. From a political theory approach, I conclude that constituent power is not a liberal idea but a key notion of moderate illiberalism that prevailed during the French Revolution. (shrink)

How do groups—be they religious or ethnic—achieve sovereignty in a postnationalist world? In Self-Determination without Nationalism, noted philosopher Omar Dahbour insists that the existing ethics of international relations, dominated by the rival notions of liberal nationalism and political cosmopolitanism, no longer suffice. Dahbour notes that political communities are an ethically desirable and historically inevitable feature of collective life. The ethical principles that govern them, however—especially self-determination and sovereignty—require reformulation in light of globalization and the economic and environmental challenges (...) of the twenty-first century. Arguing that nation-states violate the principle of self-determination, Dahbour then develops a detailed new theory of self-determination that he calls "ecosovereignty.” Ecosovereignty defines political community in a way that can protect and further the rights of indigenous peoples as well as the needs of ecological regions for a sustainable form of development and security from environmental destruction. In the series Global Ethics and Politics, edited by Carol Gould. (shrink)

The Power of Sovereignty attempts to understand the ideas and thoughts of Sayyid Qutb whose corpus of work and, in particular, his theory of hakimiyyah (sovereignty) is viewed as a threat to nationalistic government and peace worldwide. This book provides a detailed perspective of Sayyid Qutb's writings."--Jacket.

One unique part of Rousseau's Social Contract is his argument that a just society must have a specific constitutional arrangement of powers centred around what he calls the Sovereign and the Prince. This makes his philosophy different from other contractualists, such as Hobbes and Locke, who think that the principles of good government are compatible with any number of institutional structures. Rousseau's constitutional theory is thus significant in a way that has no parallel in Hobbes or Locke. More to (...) the point, any problems that exist in his constitutional theory will have consequences for his political thought as a whole. This article argues that there is a contradiction at the center of Rousseau's theory of institutions that threatens the cogency of the Social Contract. Key Words: Rousseau • separation of powers • social contract • sovereignty. (shrink)

The article argues that Spinoza's principle of political order represents a conception of sovereignty which is both historically intelligible and analytically coherent.The appropriateness of four meanings of sovereignty to Spinoza's political theory is considered. Then, after examining Spinoza's use of Hobbes's still influential touchstone for the modern theory of sovereignty, Spinoza's conception is discussed in the light of the role that customary practice and republicanism play in his political theory. The analysis of sovereignty (...) also prompts engagement with a range of meanings of the notions of constitutionalism and absolute rule.The argument demonstrates that while Spinoza employs some different criteria, he establishes a conception of sovereignty which needs to be recognised as no less internally consistent than Hobbes's. Moreover, both conceptions contain problems. Although Hobbes demonstrates the abstract logic of authority, the theoretical consequence he draws concerning sovereignty entailing a unitary state has been successfully challenged. Spinoza's conception of sovereignty is based on the logic of customary practice, but the manner in which customary practice is ultimately unsusceptible of analytical justification renders his notion also vulnerable to challenge. (shrink)

The phenomenon of “Muslim Democracy” has been analyzed by scholars for a number of years, at least since the mid-1990s. The standard view about Muslim Democracy is that (perhaps like its European counterpart Christian Democracy) it represents a nonideological, or postideological, pragmatic approach to electoral politics. The purpose of this article is to advance two primary arguments. The first is that the turn to Muslim Democracy as an ideology and practice should first be understood as a way of thinking about (...) politics that breaks with the sovereigntist imaginary that dominated modern Islamic political thought. Second, Muslim Democrats do not forswear the use of democratic means to advance goals derived from religious commitment as part of their recognition of pluralism and constitutional democracy. Their attitude toward politics should thus be seen as a form of agonistic pluralism. This article thus proposes an interpretation of Muslim Democracy as post-sovereigntist agonistic political Islam. (shrink)