Preface

Summary

This book is a treatise on political knowledge. It is a book about the concept of sovereignty and its relationship to truth, and tries to chronicle some of the major changes this relationship has undergone from the Renaissance to the present.

If this book proves to be hard reading, it is partly because the nature of its subject matter made it hard to write. In order to cover a large territory without merely iterating commonplaces, I had to phrase my questions in an abstract idiom. In order to answer these questions without merely reflecting present prejudices, I had to circumvent the trappings of an old vocabulary. In order to circumvent these trappings without becoming utterly incomprehensible, I had to impute new meaning to old terms and use new terms to convey old meanings.

This book nourishes itself on the possibility of such recontextualization and reinterpretation of terms and concepts, and implicitly argues that this is what political philosophy is all about. This insight is far from original, nor are many of the philosophical arguments presented in this book; its contribution is intended to be more specific, and concerns the consequences of such assumptions for the concept of sovereignty and its history.