90:1 January 2007
Sovereignty 

Advisory Editor: John Laughland

An important trend in the current thinking of Western policy-makers and political philosophers is the abandonment of the notion of sovereignty and the substitution of internationalist doctrines predicated upon the idea of an eventual withering away of the state. Sovereignty is attacked as being both politically unviable and morally repugnant. This development is clearest in the impetus given to supranational institutions like the European Union, as well as in the new philosophical credence lent to doctrines of universal human rights and to projects directed towards a world-wide integrated economy. These theories go hand in hand with the cosmopolitan project of creating a single post-national global polity, a project itself fuelled by the view that the unifying forces of economic globalisation render independent statehood meaningless.

In the light of these developments, this issue of The Monist will seek to analyse the essence of sovereignty and its relationship to power, human freedom, justice and the nature of man. Essays are invited on the metaphysical and ethical theories implied or presupposed by sovereignist and anti-sovereignist positions; on the relationship between statehood and the economy; and on the ways in which conceptions of sovereignty intersect with the practice of politics, with particular reference to the doctrine of universal human rights.

Table of Contents:

John Laughland,

The Crooked Timber of Reality: Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and the Confusions Of Human Rights

April Morgan

Sovereignty’s New Story

Danilo Zolo

Contemporary Uses of the Notion of ‘Empire’

Daniel Kofman

The Normative Limits to the Dispersal of Territorial Sovereignty

David Chandler: 

Potemkin Sovereignty: Statehood Without Politics in the New World Order

M. R. R. Ossewaarde

Three Rival Versions of Political Enquiry: Althusius and the Concept of Sphere Sovereignty

Siegfried van Duffel

Sovereignty as a Religious Concept