Straight Thinking About Sovereignty

Abstract

Captives of Sovereignty. By Havercroft Jonathan . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 276 pp., $89.10 hardcover (ISBN13-978-1-107-01287-5). Rather than relying on a sovereign, ultimate authority is better vested in a political community that rests on a set of common linguistic norms and the everyday mutual self-regard and communality among persons that such norms engender. This is the central thesis of Captives of Sovereignty , an erudite, carefully argued, and well-written survey of how a certain “picture” of sovereignty has come to entrance political theory in general and international relations theory in particular since the sixteenth century but should be challenged because of its fatal embrace of a centralized “truth” decider whose despotic power is based in an unexamined acceptance of epistemological skepticism. In fact, the book is part of a long tradition of works engaged in the critique of domination. Its novelty lies in identifying the origins of our collective captivity in the epistemological skepticism about the possibility of mutual agreement about moral and political purposes without a central fount of authority found in such early modern philosophers as Hobbes and Spinoza. The first part of the book is taken up with showing how much today's doctrine of state sovereignty is traceable to imputing the sovereign as the decider of truth “in such diverse areas as epistemology, ethics, and religion by determining what the truth is and using its coercive power to compel subjects to …