Sovereignty

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Hobbes on Bodin’s concept of sovereignty

April 26, 2011 in Hobbes, Methodology, Representation, Sovereignty | No comments

Jean Bodin

In Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la République (1576) the foundations of the principle of sovereignty had been already established, propounding a justification for the French monarch. Hobbes abode Bodin’s characteristics of sovereignty, yet he did not adopt the underlying context on which Bodin developed them. Bodin still bounded the supreme power of the sovereign to divine and natural law. Laws had to contain a certain value, had to bare natural justice. In Hobbes natural law only acted igniting the sparkle of an order that, after being instituted, became independent. In Bodin, the fragmentation of power was maintained by insisting in the divine character of power, there was no actual human institution but a heavenly prerogative.

Bodin’s method also differed substantially from Hobbes’s deductivism. He sustained a humanist historical-comparative approach, accepting a naturalist stance of authority by which the source of power was an imitatio divina, evincing its godlike character. To Hobbes rather than a resemblance with God’s lordship because of the same model of submission, the analogy resided in the institution of a covenant, of a conventional agreement. Hobbes rejected both traditional political theology(1) and naturalism. The constitution of the commonwealth followed, according to Bodin, the aggregation of families, social unities, to the agrandissement and constitution of a state. In the same vein as Aristotle, the state was but the enlargement, a reproduction, of the family system, it appeared thus as natural. Within Hobbes’s system sovereignty was instituted, the state only surged after the convention among people wishing to escape the natural state, -it was artificial. Moreover, in the very state of nature, -a mental construct-, the actors are men, solitary wanderers;(2) nevertheless, Hobbes still retained most of the basic properties of majestas set by Bodin.(3)

Sovereignty was deemed to be perpetual; it ought to be eternal, but their constituents, men and assemblies of men are mortal. This essential fragility supposed the relapse into the state of nature unless a system of succession was proposed. The one provided by monarchy, based on the decision of a single man, was the more feasible and apt to prevent the dissolution of majestas. For when the spirit decays, the body tumbles extenuated.(4) The main cause of mortality was the disintegration motivated by individual passions and dissidence. The preference for absolute sovereignty to aristocracy precluded the danger of factions entangled in an argument reverting in civil war.(5) Thus the sovereign afforded and represented the endless disposition of the commonwealth and was necessary for the subsistence of the represented, both being interlocked.(6)

(1) L. Borot, “Le vocabulaire du contrat, du pacte et de l’alliance: quelques enjeux lexicaux”, Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p. 205.
(2) “…indem er die Monarchie zur blossen Erscheinungsform eines staatlichen Legalitätssystems machte, vernichtete er alle ihre traditionellen und legitimen Fundamente göttlichen Rechts. Er konnte seinen monarchistischen Glauben nur dadurch retten, daß er in einen grundsätzlichen Agnostizismus zurückzog.” C. Schmitt, op. cit., p. 126.
(3) J. Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, VIII. It has also been argued some direct precedents of a theory of sovereignty in other state theoreticians. According to A. Black, Monarchy and Community. Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy 1430-1450, Cambridge, 1970, “Turrecremata thus to some extent anticipated what has been regarded as the specific achievement of Bodin, namely the elaboration of an abstract notion of sovereignty as necessary for all societies and as the only legitimate source of power,” p. 84.
(4) “The sovereignty is the soul of the commonwealth; which once departed from the body, the members do no more receive their motion from it.” Leviathan II, 21, 21.
(5) This is Hobbes’ dictum, “the greatest inconvenience that can happen to a commonwealth, is the aptitude to dissolve into civil war, and to this are monarchies much less subject, than any other governments.” Elements of Law II, 24, 8.
(6) “L’originalité des définitions données par Hobbes consiste ainsi à suggérer que le souverain est une sorte de tenancier perpétuel, indispensable pour la survie du propriétaire!” L. Jaume, “Le vocabulaire de la représentation politique de Hobbes a Kant”, Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p 237.

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Sovereignty criticisms (and III)

July 21, 2010 in Ontology, Power, Sovereignty | No comments

The rejection of sovereignty also implied a certain denial of a unified geometry from whose center power emanated uniformly. Foucault opted to investigate the particular disciplines and discourses that display a polimorphous, distributed, institutionalized power. Thus sovereignty as a classical concept, maintaing the form of a unique instance, had to be tempered by a local analysis of certain concrete practices. Governance also refers to a plurality of activities, procedures and instances in charge of attaining political results. The idea of governance without government also hints at this transformation of power without sovereignty, subjectivity without individual.(1)

A brilliant analysis of the standing of sovereignty is offered in Mairet’s work, Le Principe de Souvereinété. To him sovereignty has exhausted all its potential and thus only remains as a residue. It does not convey any horizon of future, but will decay for its revolutionary hallmark has already vanished; its functionality achieved. The absence of novel projects, new possible planes of construction, leaves it half-dead, only waiting for future configurations, to definetly transform, erode it. It only remains, according to our definition, as an insisting concept; it cannot evolve.(2) Sovereignty is also related to the decline of the individual conceptualized as a locus of will.(3) Auschwitz implied the crucifixion of the idea of individual, both the moral subject and the massification of torture and death, Hiroshima the forclusion of sovereignty and the ultimatum of the late medieval superior non recognoscens, sovereignty had to cede when external power can annihilate all prospect of life.

(1) We could trace certain dyadic relations between man and state, subject and power, and the one that will be analyzed, sovereignty and individual.
(2) “Notre siècle qui s’achève est celui de l’achèvement de la souveraineté; avec lui la souveraineté prend fin car elle s’accomplit.” G. Mairet, Le principe de souverainteté. Histoire et fondements du pouvoir moderne, Paris, 1997, p. 162.
(3) “Si donc la moralité de mon action procède de sa possible universalité, il faut que l’individu cesse d’être individuel, en quelque sorte.”Ibid., p. 177.

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Sovereignty criticisms (II)

July 14, 2010 in Sovereignty | No comments

Tantamount happens with the individuals that face anonymous relations, the debilitation of the state tends to an occlusion of its sovereignty. Both psychological and sociological aspects debouch in the analysis of bureaucracies and international relations, canvassing a distributed system of governance, marking the displacement of executive functions and, in the particular case of the EU, also legislative ones, to supra-statal institutions. On the specific challenge set by the European Union on sovereignty,(1) Sorensen has highlighted the possibility of a post-modern, empirical, statehood that really imposes a horizon of transformation to the classical concept of sovereignty.(2)

Especially contended in the basic definition of sovereign state, knitting together the elements of people, authority, and territory, is the latter aspect. Rather than denying sovereignty the question has been directed towards its localization, its emplacement. In an apparent opposition but in a consistent manner appears the debate on globalization as an erosion, a dissolution or a transformation.(3) Transformation or whithering away, has to be assessed according to sovereignty’s interaction with those other contents that provided with our canonical understanding, conforming its conditions of existence, configuring a plain of consistency.(4)

The relation between the questioning of sovereignty and post-modernity is widespread in the literature.(5) In this sense, it is often referred to the will, to the capacity of action of the state rather than the assertion of power.(6) Sovereignty thus becomes a relevant discourse in the processes of construction and deconstruction of social representations.(7) Sovereignty is thus assessed as a discursive praxis privileging certain understandings, values and interests.

(1) Cf. N. MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty. Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth, Oxford, 2001. M. Wind, Sovereignty and European Integration. Towards a post-Hobbesian order, Houndmills, 2001. J. Habermas, “The European Nation-State -Its Achievements and its Limits”, Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the nation, New York, 1996. J. Habermas, “The European Nation-State and the Pressures of Globalization”, New Left Review 235, 1999, pp. 46-59. N. Walker, Sovereignty in Transition, Oxford, 2003.

(2) G. Sorensen, “Sovereignty: Change and continuity in a fundamental institution”, Cf. R. Jackson (ed.), Sovereignty at the Millenium, Massachusetts, 1999. Sorensen distinguishes between a constitutive aspect of sovereignty, based on the central tenets of territory, people and government, that has not suffered any alteration, and a regulative aspect, with an ample content, among which he refers to non-intervention and reciprocity, that has been modified, and an empirical statehood that is experiencing profound shifts in economic relations, the polity’s structure and the redefinition of nationhood.
(3) J.A. Camilleri and J. Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The politics of a shrinking and fragmenting world, Aldershot, 1992. For a grasp at possible future alternatives cf. D.J. Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty. Territorial and Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century, Toronto, 1995. “What I see is the beginning of the unbundling of sovereignty as we have known it for many centuries -but not always. Scholars examining changes in mentalities or social epistemologies have remarked that significant, epochal change frequently could not be grasped by contemporaries: the vocabularies, categories, master images available to them were unable to capture fundamental change. Suffering from the same limitations, all we see is the collapse of sovereignty as we know it. But it seems to me rather than sovereignty eroding as a consequence of globalization and supranational organizations, it is being transformed.” S. Saasen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an age of globalization, New York, 1996, pp. 29-30.
(4) “…associated with the concept of state sovereignty, although only fully articulated by Hobbes, is the idea of the undifferentiated individual as the basic social entity facing the power and majesty of the state as embodied in the monarch.” R.E. Dowse and J.A. Hughes, Political Sociology, Chichester, 1986, p. 98. R. Lapidoth, “Sovereignty in Transition”, Journal of International Affairs 45(2), 1992, pp. 326-346. G.H. Von Wright, “The crisis of social science and the whithering away of the nation state”, Associations 1, 1997, pp. 49-52. W.G. Werner and J.H De Wilde, “The Endurance of Sovereignty”, European Journal of International Relations 7(3), 2001, pp. 283-313. D. Philpott, “Usurping the Sovereignty of Sovereignty?” World Politics 53(2), 2001, pp. 297-324. D. Philpott, “Sovereignty: An Introduction and Brief History”, Journal of International Affairs 48, 1995, pp. 353-68.

(5) Cf. R. Jackson (ed.), op. cit. J.A. Camilleri and J. Falk, op. cit.

(6) “Though the state will continue to perform important administrative and other functions, the theory of sovereignty will seem strangely out of place in a world characterized by shifting allegiances, new forms of identity and overlapping tiers of jurisdiction.”J.A. Camilleri and J. Falk, op. cit., p. 256.

(7) T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber “The social construction of state sovereignty”, T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber (eds.), State Sovereignty as a Social Construct, Cambridge, 1996. J. Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge, 1995.

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Sovereignty and the state – Individual and man

June 14, 2010 in Representation, Sovereignty, Uncategorized | No comments

My focus on the concept of sovereignty remains centered on the modern rational-legal form of authority. Sovereignty soon became the attribute of all acknowledged states and thus provided with a fundamental idea to the constitution, to the valid assertion, of political power. In certain occasion the arguments would also involve the state, in the sense that a modern plane of construction has combined these two concepts. State and sovereignty thus become interchangeable,(1) but sovereignty is a concrete figure belonging to the history of ideas, meanwhile the state refers to a wider array of features and historical events. Still the development of the idea of sovereignty affects profoundly to the content of state, sovereignty is deemed to rest as the foundation of the modern state.(2) The palpable crisis of sovereignty has been attributed to the crisis of state. The idea and the institution it supports enter in bankrupt simultaneously, demonstrating once more the importance of ideas in shaping the conditions of existence and these producing forms of legitimation, of general acceptance and attachment, attitudes.

We could recognize the state and sovereignty in the same relation as man and individual. State and man refer to wider spheres of knowledge, they are objects investigated by a multitude of disciplines (theory of administration, sociology of state, international relations; biology, economics, anthropology). On the other hand, both individual and sovereignty can be circumscribed to the history of ideas. They also shape our understanding of both man and state and they spread in the particular disciplines suffering certain mutations, but still their appearance is purely eidetical and their deployment textually traceable despite their inscription in practices.

(1) J. Hoffman, Sovereignty, Buckingham, 1998. N.G. Onuf, “Sovereignty: Outline of a Conceptual History”, Alternatives (16), 1991, pp. 425-46.
(2) “L’État moderne est un système juridique… Posé de cette manière, le problème de la date de naissance de l’État moderne n’est autre que le problème de la formation et de l’acceptation finale du concept de souveraineté.”A. Passerin d’Entrèves, La notion de l’État, Paris, 1969, p.123.

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