Sovereignty and the New Executive Authority

Abstract

This volume explores moral and legal issues relating to the concept of sovereignty across four areas. The essays in Part I address foundational questions about the nature of sovereignty and seek to trace the ways in which the traditional concept of sovereignty laid the foundation for the modern conception of executive authority. The essays in Part II examine the tension between the executive’s duty to act expeditiously for the public interest and the executive’s duty to gain citizens’ consent for his or her actions. In a liberal society, where the citizenry is understood to be the locus of sovereignty, the executive’s political power comes from the consent of the governed. Yet there are significant puzzles regarding how the public conveys its consent to the executive branch, and whether such consent remains operative. The essays in Part III consider how this relationship between the subjects and the executive branch is complicated when the latter withholds information from the former, which eliminates a meaningful conception of consent. Finally, the essays in Part IV explore the concept of horizontal sovereignty—sovereignty as reflected in states’ relations to other states. The essays in this part explore a variety of contexts in international relations in which the autonomy of individual states is limited by the entitlements of other states, such as when one state seeks to use military force against nonstate actors located in another state, or when states voluntarily limit their own autonomy by binding themselves to the terms of a treaty.