Sovereignty: New and Old

• Date: 01 August 2018
• Author: John R. Wallach
• Published date: 01 August 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717699549
• Subject Matter: Review Essays

Political Theory

2018, Vol. 46(4) 659 –668

© The Author(s) 2017

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Review Essay

Sovereignty:

New and Old

Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present, and Future of a Contested Concept, edited

by Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2010.

Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, edited by Richard Bourke and Quentin

Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Reviewed by: John R. Wallach, Hunter College & The Graduate Center, CUNY

DOI: 10.1177/0090591717699549

These two books mark a new era in historical thought about the idea of

sovereignty in general and popular sovereignty in particular. Not as con-

cerned as previous iterations of historicist thought with correcting inter-

pretations of political theorists and political ideas that paid no attention to

their character as human creations in space, time, and language, the essays

in each volume fulsomely address political ideas or concepts amid the

complex currents of politics, history, and critical thought.1

These efforts to adapt the conceptual analysis and intellectual history of

political thought more directly to our lives warrant the attention of political

theorists. But garnering that attention will be difficult. Ever since deconstruc-

tion and Foucault’s “history of the present” began to populate the perspec-

tives of humanist scholars in the 1980s—over thirty-five years ago—critiques

of the rational coherence of concepts and their dependence on power led

many to take the unnecessary and misguided step of losing interest in history

itself as a political factor in social relations. History, after all, depends on

vertical and horizontal connections, and if every connection is dangerous,

why bother reconstructing them respectfully and seriously? On the other

hand, even those of us enthralled by, say, postmodernisms, postcolonialisms;

the disintegration and castigation of identity focused around sex, gender,

race, class and religion of the nation, “Western civilization,” and reading the

globe as our oyster as it melts in the midst of political fecklessness, must

wonder, “How did we get here?” and “How might we change course?”

Moreover, historical understanding naturally reaches our reflection on our

699549PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717699549Political TheoryReview Essay

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