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.
