Sovereignty in Post‐Sovereign Society. A Systems Theory of European Constitutionalism. By Jiří Přibáň. London: Routledge, 2015. 262 pp. £34.99 paperback.

• Published date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12259
• Date: 01 March 2017

framework for understanding the emergence of the BLM social

movement and its critique of racial differences in surveillance, arrest,

prosecution, and incarceration. This book is appropriate for graduate

and upper division undergraduate courses in sociology, political sci-

ence, criminology, law, and African-American studies.

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Sovereignty in Post-Sovereign Society. A Systems Theory of European

Constitutionalism.ByJi

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n. London: Routledge, 2015. 262

pp. £34.99 paperback.

Reviewed by Daniela Piana, University of Bologna

Authors who engage in theoretical puzzles are always welcomed by

scientific communities. Authors who engage in solving puzzles by

addressing compelling paradoxes of our daily life are even more

welcome. This is the case of Ji

r

ıP

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rib

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n’s book. Following upon a

long-standing experience of research, in constitutionalism and sys-

temic theories, P

rib

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n’s work points directly to the heart of one of

the modern trinity’s pillars: sovereignty.

These are times of crisis for the traditional concept of sovereign-

ty: sovereign States seem to prove, more than ever, the limits of

their capacities to hold under stringent control the territories they

were expected to govern and testify to the sunset of the golden age

of national States as absolute protagonists of the international politi-

cal stage. Whereas the common sense according to which sovereign-

ty entered into a crisis is not in contention, much less has been done

to understand how and to what extent concepts that we still adopt

with both descriptive and prescriptive intentions, such as sovereign-

ty, coexist with the transformative social and political processes that

unfold in all institutional systems that have been the backbone of

sovereign states, whereby the legal system plays a key role. P

rib

a

n’s

book takes very seriously this coexistence and analyzes the condi-

tions under which we still can and should speak of sovereignty in

times of post sovereign societies.

The volume is structured in three parts. It starts with a diagno-

sis of sovereignty’s malaise, assessed from the point of view of the

European integration experience. In the European Union, as

P

rib

a

n’s research insightfully points to, the combination of legal

pluralism, national legal traditions, transnational values, and princi-

ples embedded in national and subnational institutional practices

214 Book Reviews