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The Long Shadow of Jean Bodin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Helmut Walser Smith
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Extract

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.

Type
Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 55 , Special Issue 1: Sovereignty in German History , March 2022 , pp. 109 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association

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References

1 For purposes of this article, I have used Bodin, Jean, Six Books of the Commonwealth, abr. and trans. by Tooley, M. J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar. The scholarship on Bodin is staggering. For an entry into it, see Franklin, Julian H., “Sovereignty and the Mixed Constitution: Bodin and His Critics,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. Burns, J. H. with the assistance of Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 298–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Tilly, Charles, “Reflections on the History of European State Making,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Tilly, Charles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42Google Scholar.

3 Dieter Grimm, Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept, trans. Belinda Cooper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

4 The famous Latin phrase does not appear in the English edition of Leviathan but rather in the preface to Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, rev. ed., Amsterdam 1647), 4; it does, however, appear in Leviathan, as “where every man is enemy to every man.” See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Norton Critical Editions), ed. David Johnston (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).

5 Samuel Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, ed. Michael J. Seidler, trans. Edmund Bohun (Indianapolis, IN: The Liberty Fund, 2007), 176–77. For a modern German translation, see Horst Denzer and Samuel Pufendorf, Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1994). On the degree to which Pufendorf's insight still holds, see Peter Wilson, “Still a Monstrosity? Some Reflections on Early Modern Statehood,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006): 565–76.

6 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, 176–77.

7 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, 176–77.

8 According to Thomas A. Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 231, the term was first coined in 1612 by Joachim Stephani of Greifswald.

9 Here, too, the literature is vast. For its clarity, see Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich. Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620,” Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1–45.

10 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Schriften und Entwürfe (1799–1808),” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5 (Düsseldorf: Meiner, Hbg., 1998), 29, 282–86.

11 Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866. Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: Beck, 1983), 11; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeshichte, 1700–1815 (Munich: Beck, 1987), 35.

12 Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 2.

13 Cited from the German version of the Bundesakte of June 8, 1815, I, in Die Verfassungen in Europa, 1789–1949, ed. Dieter Gosewinkel and Johannes Masing (Munich: Beck, 2006), 742.

14 Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Dieter Grimm, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 1776–1866. Vom Beginn des modernen Verfassungsstaats bis zur Auflösung des Deutschen Bundes (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988).

15 Oliver F. R. Haardt, “The Kaiser in the Federal State (1871–1918),” German History 34, no. 4 (2016): 529–54.

16 On Jellineck, see Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, 1800–1914, vol. 2, Staatsrechtslehre und Verwaltungswirtschaft (Munich: Beck, 1992), 450–55.

17 Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1919), 4.

18 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie—Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1922), 9; Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 7th ed. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1963), 26.

19 Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 80.

20 Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers. Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich: DTV, 1969); Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur. Entstehung, Struktur, Folgen des Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1969).

21 Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State, trans. E. A. Shils (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), xxiii.

22 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), xii.

23 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 6, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990), 152.

24 The classic account is Albert O. Hirschmann, “Voice and the Fate of the GDR: An Essay in Conceptual History,” World Politics 45 (1993): 753–54.

25 In his concise review of the history of the concept, Grimm, Sovereignty, 104–09, addresses the issue of whether today's concept of sovereignty is like the medieval concept, only to argue against the false parallel.

26 “Past Peace Operations,” United Nations Peacekeeping (https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/past-peacekeeping-operations).

27 Patel, Kiran Klaus, Project Europe: A History, trans. Dale, Meridith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 279CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Blij, Harm de, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 136Google Scholar.

29 Baumann, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

30 Here too the literature is immense. For an inspired entry, see Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

31 Luban, David, “Carl Schmitt and the Critique of Lawfare,” Georgetown Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper, 11–33 (2011): 10Google Scholar.