Die Souveränitätsfrage in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie

Abstract

SUMMARY In this article Cristiana Senigaglia examines Hegel's treatment of the question of sovereignty in his political thought. The concept of sovereign power, as developed in the writings of Bodin had been received in German thinking in the seventeenth century and the word Souveranität adopted as the German language equivalent. But as long as Germany was not a unitary state, the concept raised special problems for German thinkers. When Hegel set out his original theory of the State in 1817, his state clearly included the attribute of sovereignty but he did not develop any explicit discussion of the concept. This was developed in his writings from 1819–20, where he did set out a specific theory of sovereign power, which he saw as inseparable from the existence of the State. The article analyses Hegel's theory, and notes he attributed to sovereignty two aspects, internal and external. This produced the result that while the internal sovereignty of the State is a necessary condition for the peace and security of its citizens, the external sovereignty of the state prevents the development of any effective international order, and means that the relations between states will always produce the unending struggle for superiority described by Hobbes in his Leviathan.