The essays in this volume explore the theories and practices of sovereignty in the context of state-building in the early modern Northern and Southern Low Countries. The book approaches this historical debate from three angles: (1) political theoretical, (2) legal, and (3) politico-historical.

Popular sovereignty - the doctrine that the public powers of state originate in a concessive grant of power from "the people" - is the cardinal doctrine of modern constitutional theory, placing full constitutional authority in the people at large, rather than in the hands of judges, kings, or a political elite. This book explores the intellectual origins of this influential doctrine and investigates its chief source in late medieval and early modern thought - the legal science of Roman law. Long regarded the principal source for modern legal reasoning, Roman law had a profound impact on the major architects of popular sovereignty such as François Hotman, Jean Bodin, and Hugo Grotius. Adopting the juridical language of obligations, property, and personality as well as the classical model of the Roman constitution, these jurists crafted a uniform theory that located the right of sovereignty in the people at large as the legal owners of state authority. In recovering the origins of popular sovereignty, the book demonstrates the importance of the Roman law as a chief source of modern constitutional thought.

A collection of illustrated essays on sovereignty and political power in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.

Was the emperor as sovereign allowed to seize the property of his subjects? Was this handled differently in late medieval Roman law and in the practice and theory of zabt in Mughal India? How is political sovereignty relating to the church ́s powers and to trade? How about maritime sovereignty after Grotius? How was the East India Company as a ́corporation ́ interacting with an Indian Nawab? How was the Shogunate and the emperor negotiating ́sovereignty ́ in early modern Japan? The volume addresses such questions through thoroughly researched historical case studies, covering the disciplines of History, Political Sciences, and Law. Contributors include: Kenneth Pennington, Fabrice Micallef, Philippe Denis, Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi, Joshua Freed, David Dyzenhaus, Michael P. Breen, Daniel Lee, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Kajo Kubala, Nicholas Abbott, Tiraana Bains, Cornel Zwierlein, Mark Ravina.

With a foreword by Diego Quaglioni. This book analyses the bearing of one of the most long-standing debates of the Middle Ages, the distinction between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata (God’s absolute and ordered power), on the modern Western legal tradition.

Argues that the global order is constructed from sovereign hybridity, where power flows without regard to public and private boundaries.

The first collaborative volume to explore popular sovereignty, a pivotal concept in the history of political thought.

Offers new perspectives on how alliances in early modern Europe promoted shared sovereignty, and the impact on the evolution of the state.

Throughout the history of human intellectual endeavor, sovereignty has cut across the diverse realms of theology, political thought, and psychology. From earliest Christian worship to the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, the debates about sovereignty -- complete independence and self-government -- have dominated our history. In this seminal work of political history and political theory, leading scholar and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain examines the origins and meanings of &"sovereignty"; as it relates to all the ways we attempt to explain our world: God, state, and self. Examining the early modern ideas of God which formed the basis for the modern sovereign state, Elshtain carries her research from theology and philosophy into psychology, showing that political theories of state sovereignty fuel contemporary understandings of sovereignty of the self. As the basis of sovereign power shifts from God, to the state, to the self, Elshtain uncovers startling realities often hidden from view. Her thesis consists in nothing less than a thorough-going rethinking of our intellectual history through its keystone concept. The culmination of over thirty years of critically applauded work in feminism, international relations, political thought, and religion, Sovereignty opens new ground for our understanding of our own culture, its past, present, and future.

This book is an inquiry into the history of the idea of popular sovereignty as it has been shaped by the struggles between rulers and ruled. It builds on the notion that a thorough analysis of how the idea of popular sovereignty emerges from, and interacts with, a political history of contention within changing polities can help us to draw similarities and differences with our own age. Providing a historical perspective to the present day, Nootens pays strong attention to the role of democratization processes and to the relationship between meanings conveyed by the idea of popular sovereignty, political contention, and changing representations of the governing relationship. The latter has been undergoing significant transformations in the last decades, and these transformations impact significantly upon people’s rights, interests, wealth, and capacity to decide for themselves. In order to understand popular sovereignty in an era of globalization, this book argues that focus should be put on current struggles between rulers and ruled, as well as on current transformations of the relationship between public and private spheres. Understanding the claims involved in current processes of contention over decision-making processes is key to understanding popular sovereignty in an era of globalization. Making an important contribution to debates on sovereignty, Popular Sovereignty in the West will be of interest to students and scholars of modern political theory, sovereignty, and democratization studies.