Sovereignty and Liberty

The attitude we take to power is almost invariably one of distrust never more so than when it claims to be sovereign. And yet we have always been drawn to sovereignty. Out of fear or fascination we accepted that it was a condition of our liberty; that to assert ourselves as free we would have to work not against but through sovereign power. This book retraces the history of the implication of sovereignty and liberty an implication that has shaped the way we live together as individuals and as political beings. Shedding new light on the work of key political and constitutional thinkers including Marsilius of Padua Hobbes Hegel Kelsen and Schmitt it identifies the conceptual operations that created sovereignty and shows how subjection to an absolute and undivided power came to be a source of meaning. At the heart of the analysis is the idea that sovereignty made reference to and relied upon a form of faith which aligned manâs political existence on law. Offering new and often controversial insights into the grounds of our attachment to sovereign power and into the crisis that is currently affecting its institutions this book will appeal to students and scholars of law politics history of philosophy and the social sciences. . Language: English