A study of models of sovereignty

• Main Author: Rodney, Michael J.
• Published: Swansea University 2008
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.752167

The thesis constitutes a study of a number of models of sovereignty as a means of gaining illumination on the nature of the use of sovereignty as an explanatory idea and the practices which it is used to represent. The models studied in detail are those of Augustinus Triumphus, who provided a pre-modern model of theocratically based global governance, and of Hobbes, Austin and Schmitt, who provided models of territorially based secular governance. In the analysis of these models, the features of sovereignty that will be explored are its symbolic character, its embeddedness, the role of routine in its operation and its potentiality for rupture. In relation to the last mentioned feature, which is particularly although not solely posed in Schmitt's model of sovereignty, a grammar of normalities is developed in response to the relationship between norm and exception lying at the centre of his model. In examining these features, a philosophical framework will be developed, drawing on the writings of Ernst Cassirer, with particular reference to his ideas concerning the structure and role of symbols. Further theoretical refinements are made by supplementing the above framework with insights taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anthony Giddens and Charles Taylor, and the idea of rupture is investigated more rigorously by exploring its relationship to that of routine. At this point, a model of popular sovereignty developed by Hans Lindahl and influenced by Cassirer is critically examined and a response is made to its inadequacies. In the conclusion, the notion of a secularised chain of being is introduced as a general underlying feature of the discourse of sovereignty. It will be suggested that despite the differences between the models, they all represent particular instances of an approach dependent on this notion, which has implications for the general nature of the discourse of sovereignty.