Sovereignty: Political

Abstract

The concept of sovereignty, developed in its modern form by Bodin and Hobbes, was initially concerned primarily with internal structures of governance, especially the claim that there should be only one source of law. No state has, however, resembled the structures championed by Bodin and Hobbes, and the order that they so ardently hoped to realize through hierarchy has best been provided by modern democratic polities. In the contemporary world, sovereignty has been concerned more with the external relations of states, especially their independence from foreign authority, than with their domestic political structures. Nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states, and the right of every state to choose its own political order, has been the hallmark of the modern sovereign state system. Over the past several hundred years, the autonomy of states—their sovereignty—has, however, often been compromised through coercion or voluntary agreement in the name of other highly legitimated principles such as religious toleration, human rights, security, and economic progress. Despite many successful challenges, sovereignty, understood as state autonomy, nevertheless remains politically consequential because it is a widely understood script that can make alternative arrangements more difficult, especially in contested situations.