Paradoxes of sovereignty: Toward a Durkheimian analysis of monarchy

Abstract

In sociological or political-theoretical discussions of monarchy, the voice of Émile Durkheim is mostly absent. Although Durkheim himself had little to say on the topic, his theory of religion, and elements of his political sociology, provide resources for an engagement with monarchy both as a social institution and as a political possibility. The twentieth-century crisis of religion which Durkheim addressed in a particularly trenchant fashion has an analogue in the twentieth-century crisis of monarchical sovereignty: its supposed collapse into irrelevance, its survival, and its return in other forms. In the work of Schmitt and Agamben, this is represented as a theologico-political dilemma. This article explores what Durkheimian sociology might still contribute to a discussion of sacral and juridical aspects of sovereignty. By this is meant not only examination of its sociopolitical location and functions, but also a study of the ‘fictions’ and paradoxes of monarchical sovereignty as exemplary instances of the paradoxicality of the social. What are the features and consequences of a king-shaped hole or an empty throne in modern political imaginaries?