Sovereignty, though its meanings have varied across history, also hasa core meaning,supreme authority within a territory. It is amodern notion of political authority. Historical variants can beunderstood along three dimensions — the holder of sovereignty,the absoluteness of sovereignty, and the internal and externaldimensions of sovereignty. The state is the political institution inwhich sovereignty is embodied. An assemblage of states forms asovereign states system.

The history of sovereignty can be understood through two broadmovements, manifested in both practical institutions and politicalthought. The first is the development of a system of sovereign states,culminating at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Contemporaneously,sovereignty became prominent in political thought through the writingsof Machiavelli, Luther, Bodin, and Hobbes. The second movement is thecircumscription of the sovereign state, which began in practice afterWorld War II and has since continued through European integration andthe growth and strengthening of laws and practices to protect humanrights. The most prominent corresponding political thought occurs inthe writings of critics of sovereignty like Bertrand de Jouvenel andJacques Maritain.

• 1. A Definition of Sovereignty
• 2. The Rise of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice
• 3. The Circumscription of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. A Definition of Sovereignty

In medievalist Ernest Kantorowicz’s classic,The King’sTwo Bodies (1957), he describes a profound transformation in theconcept of political authority over the course of the Middle Ages. Thechange began when the concept of the body of Christ evolved into anotion of two bodies — one, thecorpus naturale, theconsecrated host on the altar, the other, thecorpusmysticum, the social body of the church with its attendantadministrative structure. This latter notion — of a collectivesocial organization having an enduring, mystical essence — wouldcome to be transferred to political entities, the body politic.Kantorowicz then describes the emergence, in the late Middle Ages, ofthe concept of the king’s two bodies, vivified inShakespeare’s Richard II and applicable to the early modern bodypolitic. Whereas the king’s natural, mortal body would pass awaywith his death, he was also thought to have an enduring, supernaturalone that could not be destroyed, even by assassination, for itrepresented the mystical dignity and justice of the body politic. Themodern polity that emerged dominant in early modern Europe manifestedthe qualities of the collectivity that Kantorowicz described — asingle, unified one, confined within territorial borders, possessing asingle set of interests, ruled by an authority that was bundled into asingle entity and held supremacy in advancing the interests of thepolity. Though in early modern times, kings would hold this authority,later practitioners of it would include the people ruling through aconstitution, nations, the Communist Party, dictators, juntas, andtheocracies. The modern polity is known as the state, and thefundamental characteristic of authority within it, sovereignty.

The evolution that Kantorowicz described is formative, for sovereigntyis a signature feature of modern politics. Some scholars have doubtedwhether a stable, essential notion of sovereignty exists. But there isin fact a definition that captures what sovereignty came to mean inearly modern Europe and of which most subsequent definitions are avariant:supreme authority within a territory. This is thequality that early modern states possessed, but which popes, emperors,kings, bishops, and most nobles and vassals during the Middle Ageslacked.

Each component of this definition highlights an important aspect ofthe concept. First, a holder of sovereignty possesses authority. Thatis to say, the person or entity does not merely wield coercive power,defined asA’s ability to causeB to do whathe would otherwise not do. Authority is rather what philosopher R.P.Wolff proposed: “the right to command and correlatively theright to be obeyed” (Wolff, 1990, 20). What is most importanthere is the term “right,” connoting legitimacy. A holderof sovereignty derives authority from some mutually acknowledgedsource of legitimacy — natural law, a divine mandate, hereditarylaw, a constitution, even international law. In the contemporary era,some body of law is ubiquitously the source of sovereignty.

But if sovereignty is a matter of authority, it is not a matter ofmere authority, but of supreme authority. Supremacy is what makes theconstitution of the United States superior to the government ofPennsylvania, or any holder of sovereignty different from a policechief or corporate executive. The holder of sovereignty is superior toall authorities under its purview. Supremacy, too, is endemic tomodernity. During the Middle Ages, manifold authorities held some sortof legal warrant for their authority, whether feudal, canonical, orotherwise, but very rarely did such warrant confer supremacy.

A final ingredient of sovereignty is territoriality, also a feature ofpolitical authority in modernity. Territoriality is a principle bywhich members of a community are to be defined. It specifies thattheir membership derives from their residence within borders. It is apowerful principle, for it defines membership in a way that may notcorrespond with identity. The borders of a sovereign state may not atall circumscribe a “people” or a “nation,” andmay in fact encompass several of these identities, as nationalself-determination and irredentist movements make evident. It israther by simple virtue of their location within geographic bordersthat people belong to a state and fall under the authority of itsruler. It is within a geographic territory that modern sovereigns aresupremely authoritative.

Territoriality is now deeply taken for granted. It is a feature ofauthority all across the globe. Even supranational and internationalinstitutions like the European Union and the United Nations arecomposed of states whose membership is in turn defined territorially.This universality of form is distinctive of modernity and underlinessovereignty’s connection with modernity. Though territorialityhas existed in different eras and locales, other principles ofmembership like family kinship, religion, tribe, and feudal ties havealso held great prestige. Most vividly contrasting with territorialityis a wandering tribe, whose authority structure is completelydisassociated with a particular piece of land. Territorialityspecifies by what quality citizens are subject to authority —their geographic location within a set of boundaries. Internationalrelations theorists have indeed pointed out the similarity betweensovereignty and another institution in which lines demarcate land— private property. Indeed, the two prominently rose together inthe thought of Thomas Hobbes.

Supreme authority within a territory — this is the generaldefinition of sovereignty. Historical manifestations of sovereigntyare almost always specific instances of this general definition. It isin fact the instances of which philosophers and the politicallymotivated have spoken most often, making their claim for thesovereignty of this person or that body of law. Understandingsovereignty, then, involves understanding claims to it, or at leastsome of the most important of these claims.

Over the past half millennium, these claims have taken extraordinarilydiverse forms — nations asserting independence from motherstates, communists seeking freedom from colonialists, thevoxpopuli contending withancien regimes, theocracies whoreject the authority of secular states, and sundry others. It isindeed a mark of the resilience and flexibility of the sovereign statethat it has accommodated such diverse sorts of authority. Though acatalog of these authorities is not possible here, three dimensionsalong which they may be understood will help to categorize them: theholders of sovereignty, the absolute or non-absolute nature ofsovereignty, and the relationship between the internal and externaldimensions of sovereignty.

As suggested, diverse authorities have held sovereignty — kings,dictators, peoples ruling through constitutions, and the like. Thecharacter of the holder of supreme authority within a territory isprobably the most important dimension of sovereignty. In early moderntimes, French theorist Jean Bodin thought that sovereignty must residein a single individual. Both he and English philosopher Thomas Hobbesconceived the sovereign as being above the law. Later thinkersdiffered, coming to envision new loci for sovereignty, but remainingcommitted to the principle.

Sovereignty can also be absolute or non-absolute. How is it possiblethat sovereignty might be non-absolute if it is also supreme? Afterall, scholars like Alan James argue that sovereignty can only beeither present or absent, and cannot exist partially (James 1999,462–4). But here, absoluteness refers not to the extent orcharacter of sovereignty, which must always be supreme, but rather tothe scope of matters over which a holder of authority is sovereign.Bodin and Hobbes envisioned sovereignty as absolute, extending to allmatters within the territory, unconditionally. It is possible for anauthority to be sovereign over some matters within a territory, butnot all. Today, many European Union (EU) member states exhibitnon-absoluteness. They are sovereign in governing defense, but not ingoverning their currencies, trade policies, and many social welfarepolicies, which they administer in cooperation with EU authorities asset forth in EU law. Absolute sovereignty is quintessential modernsovereignty. But in recent decades, it has begun to be circumscribedby institutions like the EU, the UN’s practices of sanctioningintervention, and the international criminal court.

A final pair of adjectives that define sovereignty is“internal” and “external.” In this case, thewords do not describe exclusive sorts of sovereignty, but differentaspects of sovereignty that are coexistent and omnipresent. Sovereignauthority is exercised within borders, but also, by definition, withrespect to outsiders, who may not interfere with the sovereign’sgovernance. The state has been the chief holder of externalsovereignty since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, after whichinterference in other states’ governing prerogatives becameillegitimate. The concept of sovereignty in international law mostoften connotes external sovereignty. Alan James similarly conceives ofexternal sovereignty as constitutional independence — astate’s freedom from outside influence upon its basicprerogatives (James 1999, 460–462). Significantly, externalsovereignty depends on recognition by outsiders. To states, thisrecognition is what a no-trespassing law is to private property— a set of mutual understandings that give property, or thestate, immunity from outside interference. It is also externalsovereignty that establishes the basic condition of internationalrelations — anarchy, meaning the lack of a higher authority thatmakes claims on lower authorities. An assemblage of states, bothinternally and externally sovereign, makes up an international system,where sovereign entities ally, trade, make war, and make peace.

2. The Rise of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice

Supreme authority with a territory — within this definition,sovereignty can then be understood more precisely only through itshistory. This history can be told as one of two broad movements— the first, a centuries long evolution towards a Europeancontinent, then a globe, of sovereign states, the second, acircumscription of absolute sovereign prerogatives in the second halfof the twentieth century.

It was at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that Europe consolidated itslong transition from the Middle Ages to a world of sovereign states.According to historian J.R. Strayer, Britain and France looked a lotlike sovereign states by around 1300, their kings possessing supremacywithin bounded territories. But as late as the beginning of theReformation in 1517, Europe remained distant from Westphalia. It wasjust around then that a great reversal in historical momentum occurredwhen Charles V of Spain ascended to the throne, uniting Castile,Aragon and the Netherlands, at the same time becoming Holy RomanEmperor, gaining prerogatives over lands in Central Europe, whiletaking on the role of enforcer of the Catholic Church’s stillsignificant temporal prerogatives inside the Empire, especially itsenforcement of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. But within the Empire,Charles V was not sovereign, either, for princes and nobles thereretained prerogatives over which he exercised no control. In 1555, asystem of sovereign states gained important ground in the Peace ofAugsburg, whose formulacuius regio, eius religio, allowedGerman princes to enforce their own faith within their territory. ButAugsburg was unstable. Manifold contests over the settlement’sprovisions resulted in constant wars, culminating finally in theThirty Years War, which did not end until 1648, at the Peace ofWestphalia.

What features of Westphalia make it the origin of the sovereign statessystem? In fact, not all scholars agree that it deserves this status(see Krasner 1999). Nowhere in the settlement’s treaties is asovereign states system or even the state as the reigning legitimateunit, prescribed. Certainly, Westphalia did not create a sovereignstates systemex nihilo, for components of the system hadbeen accumulating for centuries up to the settlement; afterwards, somemedieval anomalies persisted. In two broad respects, though, in bothlegal prerogatives and practical powers, the system of sovereignstates triumphed. First, states emerged as virtually the sole form ofsubstantive constitutional authority in Europe, their authority nolonger seriously challenged by the Holy Roman Empire. The Netherlandsand Switzerland gained uncontested sovereignty, the German states ofthe Holy Roman Empire accrued the right to ally outside the empire,while both the diplomatic communications and foreign policy designs ofcontemporary great powers revealed a common understanding of a systemof sovereign states. The temporal powers of the Church were alsocurtailed to the point that they no longer challenged anystate’s sovereignty. In reaction, Pope Innocent X condemned thetreaties of the peace as “null, void, invalid, iniquitous,unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect forall time” (quoted in Maland 1966, 16).

Second, Westphalia brought an end to a long era of intervention inmatters of religion, up to then the most commonly practiced abridgmentof sovereign prerogatives. After decades of armed contestation, thedesign of the Peace of Augsburg was finally consolidated, not in theexact form of 1555, but effectively establishing the authority ofprinces and kings over religion. Although intervention in matters ofreligion did not come to an absolute end, it became exceedingly rare,this in stark contrast to the previous 130 years, when wars ofreligion sundered Europe. As the sovereign states system became moregeneralized in ensuing decades, this proscription of interventionwould become more generalized, too, evolving into a foundational normof the international system.

Again, not all scholars agree that Westphalia deserves its‘founding moment’ status. Daniel Philpott has argued forthe orthodoxy in (Philpott, 2001). In recent years, however, a number ofscholars have come to argue that the Westphalia myth ought to bedeconstructed and discarded (Krasner, 1999; Carvalho, Leira, andHobson, 2011; Nexon, 2009; Osiander, 1994; Osiander, 2001; Teschke,2009). Generally, these scholars stress that important elements ofstatehood were around long before Westphalia and that importantelements of ‘hierarchy’, or circumscription of sovereigntyfrom above, perdured long after Westphalia. Only the long-termconsensus of scholars can determine how Westphalia will continue to beregarded.

Whether the sovereign states system was consolidated at Westphalia,took full shape at a later time, or always remained heterodox, itsbasic form nevertheless spread worldwide over the next threecenturies, culminating in the decline of the European colonial empiresin the mid-20^th century, when the state became the onlyform of polity ever to cover the entire land surface of the globe.Today, norms of sovereignty are enshrined in the Charter of the UnitedNations, whose article 2(4) prohibits attacks on “politicalindependence and territorial integrity,” and whose Article 2(7)sharply restricts intervention.

While the section that follows this one will detail thecircumscription of sovereignty following World War II, this broadhistorical trend should not obscure respects in which sovereignty haspersisted and even resurged in recent years. In an important article,international relations scholar Roland Paris (2020) makes the casethat global politics is seeing the reemergence of pre-Westphaliannotions of sovereignty, including “extralegal” and“organic” versions, which contrast with Westphaliansovereignty and its norms of the legal equality of state andnon-interference in domestic affairs. Paris documents this reemergencein Russia under President Vladimir Putin, China under President XiJinping, and the United States under President Donald Trump.

As the sovereign state was occupying the European continent, piece bypiece, in early modern times, eventually forming the system that cameto occupy the globe, contemporary political philosophers embraced thisform of polity and described what made it legitimate. They were notoriginators of the concept, for even during medieval times,philosophers like Dante and Marsilius of Padua advocated a separationof temporal and religious powers that would be achieved through atransfer of prerogatives into temporal ruler’s hands. Then, inearly modern times, there were two roughly contemporary philosopherswho did not write explicitly or consciously of sovereignty, yet whoseideas amounted in substance to important developments of the concept.Machiavelli observed the politics of city states in his RenaissanceItaly and described what a prince had to do to promote a flourishingrepublic in terms that conferred on him supreme authority within histerritory. Manifestly, he was not to be bound by natural law, canonlaw, Gospel precepts, or any of the norms or authorities thatobligated members of Christendom. Rather, he would have to be prepared“not to be good,” and to be ready to perform evil, notbecause evil was no longer evil, but because it was sometimesnecessary to further an end that was central for Machiavelli, an endthat amounts to the unifying idea of his thought: the strength andwell-ordering of the state. The obligation of the prince wasraison d’état. He was supreme within thestate’s territory and responsible for the well being of thissingular, unitary body.

Purveying sovereignty from quite a different perspective was MartinLuther. His theology of the Reformation advocated stripping theCatholic Church of its many powers, not only its ecclesiasticalpowers, but powers that are, by any modern definition, temporal.Luther held that the Church should no longer be thought of as avisible, hierarchical institution, but was rather the invisibly unitedaggregate of local churches that adhered to right doctrine. Thus, theCatholic Church no longer legitimately held vast tracts of land thatit taxed and defended, and whose justice it administered; it was nolonger legitimate for its bishops to hold temporal offices underprinces and kings; nor would the Pope be able to depose secular rulersthrough his power of excommunication; most importantly, the Holy RomanEmperor would no longer legitimately enforce Catholic uniformity. Nolonger would the Church and those who acted in its name exercisepolitical or economic authority. Who, then, would take up suchrelinquished powers? Territorial princes. “By the destruction ofthe independence of the Church and its hold on an extra-territorialpublic opinion, the last obstacle to unity within the State wasremoved,” writes political philosopher J.N. Figgis (72). It wasthis vision that triumphed at Westphalia.

Luther’s political theology explained all of this. He taughtthat under God’s authority, two orders with two forms ofgovernment existed. “The realm of the spirit” was theorder in which Christ was related to the soul of the believer. Therealm of the world was the order of secular society, where civilauthorities ran governmental institutions through law and coercion.Both realms furthered the good of believers, but in different senses;they were to be separately organized. Leaders of the church wouldperform spiritual duties; princes, kings and magistrates would performtemporal ones. Freed from the power of the pope and the CatholicChurch, having appropriated temporal powers within their realm,princes were now effectively sovereign. In that era, princes evenexercised considerable control over Protestant churches, oftenappointing their regional leaders, as described by the doctrine of“Erastianism.” Though neither Luther nor other Protestantreformers discussed the doctrine of sovereignty in any detail, theyprescribed for princes all of its substance. Again, Figgis:

The unity and universality and essential rightness of the sovereignterritorial State, and the denial of every extra-territorial orindependent communal form of life, are Luther’s lastingcontribution to politics. (91)

Other early modern philosophers, of course, espoused the doctrine ofsovereignty explicitly, and are thus more familiarly associated withit. French philosopher Jean Bodin was the first European philosopherto treat the concept extensively. His concept ofsouveraineté featured as a central concept in hiswork,De la république, which he wrote in 1576, duringa time when France was sundered by civil war between CalvinistHuguenots and the Catholic monarchy. He viewed the problem of order ascentral and did not think that it could be solved through outdatedmedieval notions of a segmented society, but only through a concept inwhich rulers and ruled were integrated into a single, unitary bodypolitic that was above any other human law, and was in fact the sourceof human law. This concept was sovereignty. Only a supreme authoritywithin a territory could strengthen a fractured community.

To be sure, Bodin thought that the body that exercised sovereignty wasbound by natural and divine law, though no human law could judge orappeal to it. More curiously, he also thought that sovereignty rightlyexercised would respect customary and property rights. It is not clearhow such a restraint was to be reconciled with the supreme status ofsovereign authority. Possibly, Bodin thought that such rights were tobe features of a legal regime which was itself sovereign with respectto other authorities. Indeed, he also thought the form of governmentthat exercised sovereign powers could legitimately vary amongmonarchy, aristocracy and democracy, though he preferred monarchy.Whatever the sovereign body looked like, though, it was not subject toany external human law or authority within its territory. F.H. Hinsleywrites:

At a time when it had become imperative that the conflict betweenrulers and ruled should be terminated, [Bodin] realized — and itwas an impressive intellectual feat — that the conflict would besolved only if it was possible both to establish the existence of anecessarily unrestricted ruling power and to distinguish this powerfrom an absolutism that was free to disregard all laws andregulations. He did this by founding both the legality of this powerand the wisdom of observing the limitations which hedged its properuse upon the nature of the body politic as a political societycomprising both ruler and ruled — and his statement ofsovereignty was the necessary, only possible, result(124–125).

An important exploration of Bodin’s thought is also DanielLee’s book,The Right of Sovereignty (2021), whichargues that Bodin did not view sovereignty as an unconstrained powerto command in the fashion of modern legal positivism but rather as anormative authority bound by natural law, the law of nations, and itscontracts. Bodin’s “statement of sovereignty” isthe first systematic one in modern European philosophy, and thusdeserves a landmark status.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes also wrote during a time ofcivil war and also arrived at the notion of sovereignty as a solution.For Hobbes, the people established sovereign authority through acontract in which they transferred all of their rights to theLeviathan, which represented the abstract notion of the state. Thewill of the Leviathan reigned supreme and represented the will of allthose who had alienated their rights to it. Like Bodin’ssovereign, Hobbes’ Leviathan was above the law, a mortal godunbound by any constitution or contractual obligations with anyexternal party. Like Bodin, Hobbes also thought the sovereign to beaccountable to God and most likely to the natural law in some form.Otherwise, though, law was the command of the sovereign ruler,emanating from his will, and the obligation to obey it absolute.

Both Bodin and Hobbes argued for sovereignty as supreme authority. Theconcept continues to prevail as the presumption of political rule instates throughout the globe today, including ones where the sovereignbody of law institutes limited government and civil rights forindividuals. Over the centuries, new notions of the holders ofsovereignty have evolved. Rousseau, far different from Bodin orHobbes, saw the collective people within a state as the sovereign,ruling through their general will. In constitutional government, it isthe people ruling through a body of law that is sovereign. That is theversion that commands legitimacy most commonly in the world today.

Yet versions of sovereignty evocative of Hobbes’ andBodin’s have carried forth into the twentieth century.Explicitly invoking both of these philosophers was the early twentiethcentury German philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt, for instance. Hisbook of 1922 opens with the line, “Sovereign is he who decideson the exception” (trans. G. Schwab, 1985). Schmitt thought thatthe sovereign was above any constitutional law and ought to be able to“make a decision” on behalf of the good of the stateduring a time of emergency. He had little respect for liberalconstitutionalism, which he thought wholly inadequate to contain thepower struggle that politics involves. By and large, there is littleindicating that, at least in this work, Schmitt thought the sovereignto be bound by divine law or natural law. The liberalconstitutionalism of Weimar Germany was his chief piece of evidencefor this conviction; during the 1930s he fervently supported theNational Socialist regime, one whose emergency powers were just thosethat he thought necessary.

3. The Circumscription of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice

The rise and global expansion of sovereignty, described and evenlauded by political philosophers, amounts to one of the mostformidable and successful political trends in modern times. But fromits earliest days, sovereignty has also met with both doubters andqualified supporters, many of whom have regarded any body oflaw’s claim to sovereign status as a form of idolatry, sometimesas a carapace behind which rulers carry out cruelties and injusticesfree from legitimate outside scrutiny. It was indeed after theHolocaust that meaningful legal and institutional circumscriptions ofsovereignty in fact arose, many of which have come to abridge therights of sovereign states quite significantly. The two most prominentcurtailments are conventions on human rights and Europeanintegration.

It was in 1948 that the vast majority of states signed the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights, committing themselves to respect over 30separate rights for individuals. As it was not a legally bindingdeclaration and contained no enforcement provisions, the declarationleft states’ sovereignty intact, but it was a first step towardstethering them to international, universal obligations regarding theirinternal affairs. Over decades, these human rights would come to enjoyever stronger legal status. One of the most robust human rightsconventions, one that indeed curtails sovereignty, even if mildly,through its arbitration mechanisms, is the European Convention for theProtection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, formed in 1950.Roughly contemporaneous, signed on December 9, 1948, was the GenocideConvention, committing signing states to refrain from and punishgenocide. Then, in the mid-1960’s, two covenants — theCovenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic,Social and Cultural Rights — legally bound most of theworld’s states to respecting the human rights of their people.Again, the signatories’ constitutional authority remainedlargely intact, since they would not allow any of these commitments toinfringe upon their sovereignty. Subsequent human rights covenants,also signed by the vast majority of the world’s states,contained similar reservations.

Only a practice of human rights backed up by military enforcement orrobust judicial procedures would circumscribe sovereignty in a seriousway. Progress in this direction began to occur after the Cold Warthrough a historic revision of the Peace of Westphalia, one thatcurtails a norm strongly advanced by its treaties —non-intervention. In a series of several episodes beginning in 1990,the United Nations or another international organization has endorseda political action, usually involving military force, that the broadconsensus of states would have previously regarded as illegitimateinterference in internal affairs. The episodes have involved theapproval of military operations to remedy an injustice within theboundaries of a state or the outside administration of domesticmatters like police operations. Unlike peacekeeping operations duringthe Cold War, the operations have usually lacked the consent of thegovernment of the target state. They have occurred in Iraq, the formerYugoslavia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Cambodia, Liberia,Libya and elsewhere. Although the legitimacy and wisdom of individualinterventions is often contested among states — the U.S. bombingof Iraq in December 1999 and NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, forinstance, failed to elicit U.N. Security Council endorsement, as didthe U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 — the broad practice ofintervention is likely to continue to enjoy broad endorsement withinthe U.N. Security Council and other international organizations.

An explicit call to revise the concept of sovereignty so as to allowfor internationally sanctioned intervention arose with TheResponsibility to Protect, a document written and produced in 2001 bythe International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, acommission that the Government of Canada convened at the behest ofU.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. The document proposes a strongrevision of the classical conception by which sovereignty involves a“responsibility to protect” on the part of a state towardsits own citizens, a responsibility that outsiders may assume when astate perpetrates massive injustice or cannot protect its owncitizens. Responsibility to Protect has garnered wide internationalattention and serves as a manifesto for a concept of sovereignty thatis non-absolute and conditional upon outside obligations.

The other way in which sovereignty is being circumscribed is throughEuropean integration. This idea also arose in reaction to theHolocaust, a calamity that many European leaders attributed at leastin part to the sovereign state’s lack of accountability.Historically, the most enthusiastic supporters of European integrationhave indeed come from Catholic Christian Democratic parties, whoseideals are rooted in medieval Christendom, where at least in theory,no leader was sovereign and all leaders were accountable to auniversal set of values. In the modern language of human rights anddemocracy, they echo Pope Innocent X’s excoriation of the Peaceof Westphalia.

European integration began in 1950, when six states formed theEuropean Coal and Steel Community in the Treaty of Paris. Thecommunity established joint international authority over the coal andsteel industries of these six countries, entailing executive controlthrough a permanent bureaucracy and a decision-making Council ofMinisters composed of foreign ministers of each state. This same modelwas expanded to a general economic zone in the Treaty of Rome in 1957.It was enhanced by a judicial body, the European Court of Justice, anda legislature, the European Parliament, a directly elected Europe-widebody. Over time, European integration has widened, as the institutionnow consists of twenty-seven members, and deepened, as it did in the1991 Maastricht Treaty, which expanded the institution’s powersand reconfigured it as the European Union. Far from a replacement forstates, the European Union rather “pools” importantaspects of their sovereignty into a “supranational”institution in which their freedom of action is constrained (Keohane& Hoffman 1991). They are no longer absolutely sovereign. Inrecent years, European integration has continued to advance inimportant respects. On December 1, 2009, the Treaty of Lisbon cameinto full force, pooling sovereignty further by strengthening theCouncil of Ministers and the European Parliament, creating a HighRepresentative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy torepresent a unified European Union position, and making the EuropeanUnion’s Charter of Fundamental Human Rights legally binding.However, strains on European integration have emerged in recent yearsas well. A treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was signed bythe European Union’s member states in 2004, but referendums inFrance and the Netherlands in 2005 rejected it and prevented itsratification. Then, in 2016, a referendum in the United Kingdomresulted in a victory for the U.K.’s withdrawal from theEuropean Union, popularly known as “Brexit.”

This circumscription of the sovereign state, through internationalnorms and supranational institutions, finds a parallel in contemporaryphilosophers who attack the notion of absolute sovereignty. Theirthought is not entirely new, for even in early modern times,philosophers like Hugo Grotius, Alberico Gentili, and FranciscoSuarez, though they accepted the state as a legitimate institution,thought that its authority ought to be limited, not absolute. Thecruel prince, for instance, could be subject to a disciplining actionfrom neighboring princes that is much like contemporary notions ofhumanitarian intervention.

Two of the most prominent attacks on sovereignty by politicalphilosophers since World War II came in the 1950s from Bertrand deJouvenel and Jacques Maritain. In his prominent work of 1957,Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into the Political Good, Jouvenelacknowledges that sovereignty is an important attribute of modernpolitical authority, needed to quell disputes within the state and tomuster cooperation in defense against outsiders. But he roundlydecries the modern concept of sovereignty, which creates a power whois above the rules, a power whose decrees are to be consideredlegitimate simply because they emanate from his will. To Jouvenel,sovereignty reached its peak in Hobbes, in whose “horrificconception everything comes back to means of constraint, which enablethe sovereign to issue rights and dictate laws in any way he pleases.But these means of constraint are themselves but a fraction of thesocial forces concentrated in the hand of the sovereign” (197).Despite their differences over the locus and form of sovereignty,subsequent thinkers like Locke, Pufendorf, and Rousseau “were tofeel the lure of this mechanically perfect construction” (198).This was “the hour ofsovereignty in itself,”writes Jouvenel, the existence of which “hardly anyone wouldthenceforward have the hardihood to deny” (198).

As his description of Hobbes intimates, Jouvenel views early modernabsolute sovereignty with great alarm. “[I]t is the idea itselfwhich is dangerous,” he writes (198). But rather than callingfor the concept to be abrogated, he holds that sovereignty must bechanneled so that sovereign authority wills nothing but what islegitimate. Far from being defined by the sovereign, morality has anindependent validity. Appealing to the perspective of “Christianthinkers,” he argues that “there are . . . wills which arejust and wills which are unjust” (201). “Authority,”then, “carries with it the obligation to command the thing thatshould be commanded” (201). This was the understanding ofauthority held by the ancien regime, where effective advisers to themonarch could channel his efforts towards the common good. What canchannel the sovereign will today? Jouvenel seems to doubt thatjudicial or constitutional design is alone enough. Rather, he placeshis hope in the shared moral concepts of the citizenry, which act as aconstraint upon the choices of the sovereign.

In Chapter Two of his enduring work of 1951,Man and theState, Jacques Maritain shows little sympathy for sovereignty atall, not even the qualified sympathy of Jouvenel:

It is my contention that political philosophy must get rid of theword, as well as the concept, of Sovereignty:-not because it is anantiquated concept, or by virtue of a sociological-juridical theory of“objective law”; and not only because the concept ofSovereignty creates insuperable difficulties and theoreticalentanglements in the field of international law; but because,considered in its genuine meaning, and in the perspective of theproper scientific realm to which it belongs — politicalphilosophy — this concept is intrinsically wrong and bound tomislead us if we keep on using it — assuming that it has beentoo long and too largely accepted to be permissibly rejected, andunaware of the false connotations that are inherent in it(29–30).

Bodin’s and Hobbes’ mistake was in conceiving ofsovereignty as authority that the people permanently transferred andalienated to an external entity, here the monarch. Rather thanrepresenting the people and being accountable to it, the sovereignbecame a transcendent entity, holding the supreme and inalienableright to rule over the people, independently of them, rather thanrepresenting the people, accountable to them. Like Jouvenel, Maritainrues the exaltation of the sovereign’s will such that what isjust is what serves his interest. This is idolatry. Any transfer ofthe authority of the body politic either to some part of itself or tosome outside entity — the apparatus of the state, a monarch, oreven the people — is illegitimate, for the validity of agovernment is rooted in its relationship to natural law. Sovereigntygives rise to three dysfunctionalities. First, its external dimensionrenders inconceivable international law and a world state, to both ofwhich Maritain is highly sympathetic. Second, the internal dimensionof sovereignty, the absolute power of the state over the body politic,results in centralism, not pluralism. Third, the supreme power of thesovereign state is contrary to the democratic notion ofaccountability.

As a Catholic philosopher, Maritain’s arguments run similar toChristian philosophers of early modern Europe who criticized absolutesovereignty. Witnessing the rise of the formidable entity of thestate, they sought to place limits on its power and authority. Theyare the ancestors of those who now demand limits on the state’sauthority in the name of human rights, of the right to quell genocideand disaster and deliver relief from the outside, of an internationalcriminal court, and of a supranational entity that assumes power ofgovernance over economic, and now, maybe, military affairs.

The case for circumscribing sovereignty remains strong in the Catholicand other Christian traditions. Pope Benedict XVI made a case for theResponsibility to Protect, for instance, in his 2008 speech to theUnited Nations. In recent years, political philosophers in the liberaltradition have argued for the circumscription of sovereignty as well.Two examples are Thomas Pogge (1992, and 2008, 174–201) andAllen Buchanan (2004). Both accord sovereignty an important but not anabsolute moral status, seeking to make room for possibilities such ashumanitarian intervention approved by the United Nations and the morerobust development of global institutions for fighting poverty.

Bibliography

• Atanassow, Ewa, Thomas Bartscherer, and David A. Bateman (eds.),2023.When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory andPractice, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Barkin, J. Samuel, 2021.The Sovereignty Cartel,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bartelson, J., 1995.A Genealogy of Sovereignty,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bodin, J., 1992.On Sovereignty: Four Chapters From Six Booksof the Commonwealth, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
• Brown, Wendy, 2010.Walled States, Waning Sovereignty,Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010
• Buchanan, Allen, 2004.Justice, Legitimacy, andSelf-Determination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• de Carvalho, Benjamin, Halvard Leira and John Hobson, 2011.‘The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and1919,’Millennium, 39(3): 735–758.
• Ciorciari, John D., 2021.Sovereignty Sharing in FragileStates, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 2008.Sovereignty: God, State, andSelf, New York: Basic Books.
• Ferrara, Alessandro, 2023.Sovereignty Across Generations:Constituent Power and Political Liberalism, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
• Figgis, J. N., 1907.From Gerson to Grotius1414–1625, 2nd edition; reprinted, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1916.
• Fowler, M. R. and J. M. Bunck, 1995.Law, Power, and theSovereign State, University Park, PA: Penn State Press.
• Grimm, Dieter, and Belinda Cooper, 2015.Sovereignty: TheOrigin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept, New York:Columbia University Press.
• Grotius, Hugo, 1625.The Rights of War and Peace, London:M. Walter Dunne, 1901.
• Herzog, Don, 2020.Sovereignty, RIP, New Haven: YaleUniversity Press.
• Hinsley, F. H., 1986.Sovereignty, second edition,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hobbes, Thomas, 1651.Leviathan, Harmondsworth: Penguin,1968.
• International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty:Report, 2001.The Responsibility to Protect, InternationalDevelopment Research Centre Publications [Preprint available online].
• Jackson, Robert, 2007.Sovereignty: The Evolution of AnIdea, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• James, Alan, 1986.Sovereign Statehood, London: Allen& Unwin.
• James, Alan, 1999. ‘The Practice of Sovereign Statehood inContemporary International Society,’Political Studies,47(3): 457–473.
• de Jouvenel, Bertrand, 1957.Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into thePolitical Good, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Kallis, Aristotle, 2018. ‘Populism, Sovereigntism, and theUnlikely Re-Emergence of the Territorial Nation-State,’Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 11(3):285–302.
• Kalmo, Hent, and Quentin Skinner, 2014.Sovereignty inFragments: The Past, Present, and Future of a Contested Concept,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kantorowicz, Ernst, 1957.The King’s Two Bodies: A Studyin Medieval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.
• Keohane, Robert O. and Stanley Hoffmann, 1991.‘Institutional Change in Europe in the 1980s,’ inTheNew European Community: Decisionmaking and Institutional Change,R. O. Keohane and S. Hoffmann (eds.), Boulder: Westview Press.
• Krasner, Stephen D., 1999.Sovereignty: OrganizedHypocrisy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Kratochwil, Friedrich, 1989.Rules, Norms, and Decisions: Onthe Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in InternationalRelations and Domestic Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
• Lee, Daniel, 2021.The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on theSovereign State and the Law of Nations, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.
• Luther, Martin., 1523.Temporal Authority: To What Extent ItShould Be Obeyed, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967.
• Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1532.The Prince and theDiscourses, New York: The Modern Library, 1950.
• Maland, David, 1966.Europe in the Seventeenth Century,London: Macmillan.
• Maritain, Jacques, 1951.Man and the State, Chicago:University of Chicago Press.
• Nexon, Daniel H., 2009.The Struggle for Power in Early ModernEurope: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and InternationalChange, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Osiander, Andreas, 1994.The States System of Europe,1640–1994, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Osiander, Andreas, 2001. ‘Sovereignty, InternationalRelations, and the Westphalian Myth,’InternationalOrganization, 55(2): 253–254.
• Paris, Roland, 2020. ‘The Right to Dominate: How Old IdeasAbout Sovereignty Pose New Challenges for World Order,’International Organization, 74(3): 1–37.
• Pavel, Carmen, 2014.Divided Sovereignty: InternationalInstitutions and the Limits of State Authority, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
• Philpott, Daniel, 2001.Revolutions in Sovereignty: How IdeasShaped Modern International Relations, Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.
• Pogge, Thomas, 1992. ‘Cosmopolitanism andSovereignty,’Ethics, 103: 48–75.
• Pogge, Thomas, 2008.World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd.edition, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Schmitt, Carl, 1922.Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zurLehre von der Souveränität, München und Leipzig:Verlag von Duncker & Humblot; translated asPoliticalTheology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, G. Schwab(trans.), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• Spruyt, Hendrik, 1994.The Sovereign State and ItsCompetitors, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Srivastava, Swati, 2022.Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics(Cambridge Studies in International Relations), Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
• Teschke, Benno, 2009.The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics,and the Making of Modern International Relations, London:Verso.
• Wheatley, Natasha, 2023.The Life and Death of States: CentralEurope and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty, Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Wilks, Michael, 1964.The Problem of Sovereignty in the LaterMiddle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Wolff, R. P., 1990.The Conflict Between Authority andAutonomy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Academic Tools

	How to cite this entry.
	Preview the PDF version of this entry at theFriends of the SEP Society.
	Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
	Enhanced bibliography for this entryatPhilPapers, with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources

• “Something Happened. Sovereignty and European Integration”, by Adrián Tokár, preprint of article inExtraordinary Times, Institut für die Wissenschaften vomMenschen, Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vol. 11: Vienna2001
• “State sovereignty and the protection of fundamental human rights: an international law perspective”, by Alain Pellet (University of Paris X-Nanterre, member and formerChairman of the International Law Commission of the UnitedNations)

Related Entries

authority |cosmopolitanism |Dante Alighieri |Hobbes, Thomas: moral and political philosophy |Maritain, Jacques |medieval philosophy |nationalism |rights: human |world government