America's sovereignty at stake.

• Author: Rabkin, Jeremy
• Position: American Thought - Essay

"WOULD WE be far wrong," Pres. Abraham Lincoln asked in a special message to Congress in 1861, "if we defined [sovereignty] as a political community without a political superior?" Maybe that is not exhaustive, but it comes on good authority--and notice that, for Lincoln, sovereignty is a political or legal concept. It is not about power. Lincoln did not say that the sovereign is the one with the most troops. He was making a point about rightful authority.

By contrast, sovereignty was not an issue in the ancient world. Statesmen Marcus Tullios Cicero notes that the ancient Romans had the same word for "stranger" as for "enemy." In the ancient world, people did not interact with foreigners enough to think about their relation to them except insofar as it meant war--nor was sovereignty an issue in medieval Europe, since the defining character of that period was overlapping authority and a lot of confusion about which authority had primary claims. No one had to think about defining national boundaries. This became an issue only in the modern era, when interaction among different peoples increased.

The first important writer to address sovereignty was Jean Bodin, a French jurist of the late 16th century. In his work, Six Books of the Republic, Bodin set out an understanding of sovereignty whereby the King of France represented an independent political authority rather than owing allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor or to the Pope. In the course of developing this argument, Bodin also advocated religious toleration and insisted that a monarch neither can seize property except by law nor raise taxes except by the consent of a representative body. He was in favor of free wade, and he insisted on the monarch's general obligation to respect the law of nature and the law of God. His main practical point was that the government must be strong enough to protect the people's rights, yet restrained enough not to do more than that.

Subsequently, I might add, Bodin wrote a book about witchcraft--which he very much opposed. Witches are people who think they can make an end run around the laws of nature and God using magical spells, and Bodin saw them as a menace.

It was not until the 17th century that the word "sovereignty" became common. This also was when people first came to think of representative assemblies as legislatures. Indeed, the word "legislature" is itself a 17th-century term reflecting the modern emphasis on law as an act of governing will rather than impersonal custom. It therefore related to the modern notion of government by consent. Significantly, it also was in this same era that professional armies came into being. Before the 17th century, for instance, there was no such thing as standard military uniforms. Uniforms indicate that soldiers have a distinct status and serve distinct governments. They reflect a kind of seriousness about defense.

Moreover, the 17th century is the period when people began thinking in a systematic way about what we now call international law or the law of nations--a law governing the relation of sovereign nations. The American Declaration of Independence refers to such a law in its first sentence: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to...