The Long Shadow of Jean Bodin

Abstract

Neither the historiographical focus on sovereignty nor the concept of sovereignty is new. What is new is the stress on it as a negotiated concept, as a field for claims, and as a gray zone between the public and the private, the state and the individual. This new approach locates sovereignty not only with the sovereign, but also with the people over whom the sovereign rules; more precisely, it locates it in a field of force betwixt and between the two. Sovereignty is less a thing to be measured than it is a dynamic to be followed, a question to be asked, even a rhetorical device. Focusing on different kinds of actors, from colonial profiteers to NGO officials, this new lens allows one to see sovereign power from above as only one locus of sovereignty. Another is the individual. For her, protracted negotiations and staking of claims often define the general contours and limits of sovereignty.