Modern Political Thinkers and Ideas

An Historical Introduction

Tudor Jones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134686520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Modern Political Thinkers and Ideas is an exciting new text that provides students with a clearly presented introduction to some of the key areas of modern political thought. Uniquely combining historical and philosophical approaches to the subject, it describes the writings and ideas of the most influential thinkers of the modern era. Modern Political Thinkers and Ideas features: * the main concepts in modern political theory such as: the State and Sovereignty; Political Obligation and Civil Disobedience; Liberty; Rights; Equality and Justice; Democracy
* the ideas of key thinkers such as: Machiavelli; Hobbes; Locke; Paine; Rousseau; Burke; Mill; Bentham; Marx; Rawls; Hayek
* a clear and instructive framework for each chapter which provides students with: (a) the significance of each concept in modern political thought; (b) what major political thinkers had to say about each concept; and (c) the relevance of key concepts to contemporary argument and debate.

Chapter 1

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Sovereignty

Historical development of the concept

Essental aspects of sovereignty: meanings and usages

Conclusion

Machiavelli on the Prince’s power

Hobbes: the sovereignty of the Leviathan state

Locke on sovereignty as trusteeship

Rousseau and popular sovereignty

Contemporary debates

Further reading

Sovereignty is a major defining feature of the modern state. For over 350 years it has been a central characteristic of both national and international politics and a key concept in the historical development of modern political thought. In the twentieth century, it has also been a guiding principle in the conduct of international relations as well as an issue of enduring, sometimes bitter, debate and controversy.

Section A

Historical Development of the Concept

The essential meaning of sovereignty is commonly defined as the right and/or ability of a particular body or ruler to exercise ultimate and supreme authority or command within certain defined territorial boundaries. Historically it developed as a key concept in political theory, and became a critical issue in practical politics, as a result of the gradual emergence in Europe of modern states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This process took place in the wake of the breakdown both of the medieval, feudal social order and of the organized structure of the medieval Catholic Church. Their replacement by centralized absolutist monarchies – notably in England, France, Spain and Portugal – led to the formation of new secular structures of political organization and authority which gradually became dominant, externally, over the Holy Catholic Church and Holy Roman Empire and, domestically, over the landowning feudal lordships – the three main centres of power in the Middle Ages.

The Treaties and Peace of Westphalia (1648) are widely regarded by historians as the crucial development that formalized this gradual transition. Following in the wake of a succession of bloody civil and religious wars that had disfigured Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including in particular the Thirty Years War, the Westphalia settlement heralded a new international order based on independent sovereign states and hence on the institution of secular, monarchical rule exercised within and over them.

The legal and political authority of these newly-emergent states – their right, that is, to make laws and policies – was soon held to be superior to the authority of any other body or institution either within or outside the states’ territorial boundaries. In the past, by contrast, during a long conflict that raged from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, the authority of kings throughout Europe had been regarded as coordinate with, or even subordinate to, that of the Catholic Church within the framework of the medieval church-state.¹

The new, dominant political structures of centralized rule throughout Europe gradually developed, through a process of political and economic organization, into nation-states. For the emerging states were typically rooted in the idea of a nation – a community which shared certain vital characteristics, including a common territorial space, language, culture and history.

In the light of these developments, European political thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became suffused with the modern conception of the state as a supreme, all-powerful, all-embracing authority, as a centralized power structure, usually headed by an absolute monarch and operating within defined national territorial limits. This dominant idea and reality in turn generated the concept of sovereignty, implying that the new secular political structures commanded absolute legal and political authority. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this concept of state sovereignty became the foundation stone of European political thought. It was embryonic in the political ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) who formulated a view of the state as a secular, independent and morally-neutral entity. He was the first major political thinker to break with the assumptions of medieval catholic thought, rejecting, in particular, the idea of the limited authority of the state, which had implied its subordinate status in relation to the Catholic Church. Machiavelli’s conception of the modern state was most clearly apparent in his theory of the powerful ruler – developed in his most famous work, The Prince (1532) – who was needed either to found a new state as its ultimate legislator or to reform a corrupt state as its benevolent dictator.

The concept of sovereignty was explicitly developed later in the sixteenth century by Jean Bodin (1530–96) and in the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the first systematic modern political thinker. Both of them, influenced by their experience of civil and religious wars and civil disorder, regarded sovereignty – understood, in Bodin’s words, as the ‘most high and perpetual power’ – as the essential condition of an orderly and stable political regime, in Hobbes’s case, as the only viable alternative to a condition of widespread anarchy. In sharp contrast to earlier acceptance of the much more diffuse and polycentric medieval political order, Bodin and Hobbes thus emphasized the need for the concentration of political authority – of the right to make laws and issue commands – in the hands of a single person or body and within the formal framework of either a monarchy or a republic. Hobbes, in particular, powerfully reinforced this idea with the aid of a sophisticated political theory, developed in his masterwork Leviathan (1651), that invested the sovereign ruler with absolute power as the necessary means both of ensuring the security of person and property of the individual and of preventing the ever-present possibility of a descent into chaos and anarchy in human society.

Later in the seventeenth century, John Locke (1632–1704) developed a different perspective on the question of the sovereignty of the modern state. In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke argued that sovereignty resided ultimately with the people, who had loaned their power to the English Parliament as their representative assembly, and not with the monarch. He presented this argument as a justification for the English ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and hence as a theoretical defence of both a constitutional monarchy and limited government, innovations that had been created by that uprising.

By the second half of the eighteenth century the French political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) formulated the first coherent case in early modern political thought (the body of ideas roughly spanning the period from 1500 to the French Revolution of 1789) for popular sovereignty. In his most famous work of political theory, The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau promoted the ideal of a sovereign community and state, rooted in a form of participatory, direct democracy, that would serve as the embodiment of what he referred to as the general will, a kind of pervasive patriotic spirit engendered by a concern for the common good. In the second part of this chapter we shall examine in more detail the contributions which Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau made to theoretical accounts and discussions of sovereignty.

Essential Aspects of Sovereignty: Meanings and Usages

In employing and defining the concept of sovereignty, modern political thinkers have commonly observed two important distinctions: first, between legal and political sovereignty, and second, between internal and external sovereignty.

Legal Sovereignty

Legal sovereignty involves the idea of supreme or ultimate legal authority within a political community – in other words, the right or entitlement of a person, office or body to make, interpret and enforce the laws which govern that community. This right entails an obligation on the part of subjects or citizens within that political community to comply with those laws. Legal sovereignty has often been referred to as de jure sovereignty – that is, a claim to exercise supreme legal authority that rests on legal right rather than on force. Such a claim thus presupposes the supremacy of law – of authoritative legal rules binding on all members of society.

A further implication of the notion of legal sovereignty is that the person or body exercising supreme legal authority is not subject to any higher power with regard to the making or enforcement of laws. In view of the fact that the concept of sovereignty has been intimately connected since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the emergence of the modern state, this has also meant that the state’s rules override those of any other association within the state’s territorial boundaries.

Moreover, legal sovereignty has a political as well as a purely legal dimension since it refers to the supreme authority of legislatures or assemblies as well as that of the courts. This dual aspect has been particularly evident since the nineteenth century in the British political system with regard to the legislative supremacy of the UK Parliament – more precisely, of the Queen in Parliament. In practice, however, Parliamentary sovereignty since 1945 has been increasingly challenged or eroded both by an ever-expanding executive and by the increased powers of the European Community/Union.

For these reasons the meaning of legal sovereignty when applied to the British state has become less clear over time. It has been even more contested in federal political systems such as those of the USA and Germany where discussion of the meaning of sovereignty has become bound up with the question of its location. In the American context, for instance, sovereignty is usually held to be vested in the US constitution rather than in specific institutions such as the Presidency, Congress or the Supreme Court.

Nonetheless, in spite of the practical difficulties raised by its application to particular political systems, legal sovereignty in essence amounts to a definition of the state’s supremacy in terms of its ultimate legal authority rather than its supreme coercive power.

Political Sovereignty

The notion of political sovereignty defines the state’s supremacy in terms of its actual exercise of coercive power rather than its legal authority. It thus refers to the assertion of unlimited political power; to the capacity of a person or institution within the state to command obedience to laws or policy decisions by virtue of coercive force effectively exerted by that person or institution. This process has often been referred to as one of de facto (concerning fact or action) rather than de jure (concerning right) sovereignty.

A definition based on the notion of political sovereignty has often been regarded, especially by those who consider the idea of legal sovereignty to be too restrictive, as having two concrete advantages. First, it refers to the actual, rather than formal, exercise of power within a political system, the actual process whereby a person or institution controls the apparatus of the state. For example, in the United Kingdom, although legal sovereignty is vested in Parliament, all major political decisions are in fact taken by the government of the UK, specifically by the Prime Minister and his/her Cabinet, with the backing and approval of Parliament.

Second, political sovereignty also refers to the practical reality that the state’s claim to ultimate legal authority needs to be guaranteed by its exercise of coercive power. It thus underlines the need for political rulers or institutions to have the effective capacity to exercise formal legal supremacy.

D.D. Raphael has observed that many contemporary political theorists and political scientists have tended to define the sovereignty of the state in these apparently realistic political terms since they have often equated sovereignty with ‘supremacy of coercive power rather than of legal authority’.² However, stressing the limits of this interpretation, Raphael points out that the state’s coercive power is not always a necessary condition for substantiating its claim to supreme legal authority. This is particularly the case in the field of international relations where small sovereign states (e.g. Liechtenstein, San Marino, Ghana) are legally recognized in spite of their political weakness.

In addition, Raphael argues that a state’s coercive power is not a sufficient condition for substantiating its claim to sovereignty. Power alone is simply not enough. It must be accompanied, as Hobbes stressed in Leviathan,³ by the people’s acknowledgement of the state’s legal and political authority; of its right, that is, to make laws and political decisions.

Viewed from this perspective, the sovereignty of the state largely rests, as the eminent German social theorist Max Weber (1864–1920) contended, on the extent to which its exercise of coercive power is widely held to be legitimate. This requires popular acceptance of the need to comply with the state’s laws and constitution, which is indeed the objective basis of its authority. According to this view, the essence of the concept of sovereignty may thus be identified as right or entitlement, and hence authority, rather than force or power.

But as Barbara Goodwin has pointed out,⁴ another problem with what Raphael calls the power theory of sovereignty is that its ostensibly hard-headed, de facto approach to the entire issue makes it impossible to establish the state’s right to coercive power, and hence to the people’s obedience, even if it does make sovereignty easier to identify or locate empirically.⁵

A fundamental point, related to these objections, has also been forcefully made by Noel Malcolm, who observes that the distinction between power and authority is really ‘the basis ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Boxed Biographies
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Sovereignty
• 2. Political obligation
• 3. Liberty
• 4. Rights
• 5. Equality
• Select Bibliography
• Index