Variations on Sovereignty
His power cannot, without his consent, be transferred to another: he cannot forfeit it: he cannot be accused by any of his subjects of injury: he cannot be punished by them: he is judge of what is necessary for peace, and judge of doctrines: he is sole legislator, and supreme judge of controversies, and of the times and occasions of
—Hobbes, Leviathan, xx, 3
war and peace: to him it belonged to choose magistrates, counsellors, commanders, and all other officers and ministers; and to determine of rewards and punishments, honour and order.
The “he” referred to in this passage is “the sovereign,” any sovereign, as conceived by the most influential interpreter and teacher of sovereignty. Hobbes’ use of the singular pronoun (“he,” “him”) does not mean that sovereignty can only be vested in a single human being. He is a single “person,” but this person can as easily and legitimately be constituted by several human beings or even a multitude of human beings as by a single human being. And when the sovereign is a single human being, “he” might just as easily be a she. What matters is only that sovereignty, to be sovereignty, must be absolute and indivisible. The sovereign must be vested all of the above listed powers.
Hobbes’ conception of sovereignty seems to have set the terms for political discourse in the modern world, particularly since the Treaty of Westphalia. Even those who recoil from Hobbes’ absolutism and would limit the power of the sovereign or have it dispersed among different parts of the body politic still tend to speak of sovereignty as something necessarily lodged in a single body, which Hobbes called a commonwealth and which we more typically call a state.
This faculty research seminar proposes to look at sovereignty as a far more fluid and complex thing or question than we normally admit. In doing we believe that this proposed topic can be engaged by wide array of disciplines and can be relevant to variety of research topics. Participants might, for instance, explore how sovereignty in different places and in different moments in time was conveyed pictorially or discursively. Is it productive, or even possible to
consider the author as sovereign? How have notions of sovereignty informed how divinity is imagined? Alternatively, one might examine how notions of sovereignty informed the formation or breakdown of imperial ambitions. Relatedly, the bestowal, denial, or rejection of sovereignty speaks deeply to questions about colonialism and the post-colonial condition. The topic also speaks to questions over the sovereignty of the body or bodies, and therefore engages with lively discourses ongoing in gender and queer theory. More unconventionally, sovereignty might offer up productive metaphors for thinking of the self’s relationship to or master of itself.
Readings will be solicited from all members of the seminar. We anticipate that readings will be drawn from historians, interpreters, and normative theorists. We ourselves would suggest works by notable recent figures (e.g., Ernst Kantorowicz, Leszek Kołakowski, Jacques Derrida, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss) as well as seminal works drawn from the history of political thought (possibilities include Plato, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche).
The Seminar will meet regularly during the 2023-23 academic year to discuss common readings and individual research and creative work of participants. Fellows receive $2400 for their participation; in addition, the Seminar as a whole has a book budget of $500 total. In the year following the Seminar (2023-2024), participants will also: (1) present the fruits of their work in this seminar (typically through a public panel discussion featuring the research projects of each participant) in the Dialogos series, and (2) if desired, plan an event (mini-conference, guest
lecture, reading group with a visiting scholar, exhibition, or etc.) to encourage further reflection on the Seminar theme.
2021-22 Faculty Fellows
Doug Casson, Professor of Political Science, St. Olaf, will finish a chapter, “John Locke and the Non-Sovereign Self,” which is part of a larger project that focuses on the relationship between governing a polity and governing a soul in the early modern period. He hopes to clarify how Locke embodies but also complicates early modern notions of sovereignty.
Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Associate Professor of Political Science, will work on book chapter where she reconstructs the position of a cultural mediator and translator, of a traveler between cultures, who, nevertheless, does not give up belonging and the importance of having a home. The chapter is part of a larger book project on the meaning and relevance of humanism today in the conception of the Bulgarian French thinker, Tzvetan Todorov.
Cathy Yandell, W. I. and Hulda F. Daniell Professor of French and Francophone Studies, will work on a chapter from her book project, Minding the Renaissance Body from Rabelais to Descartes, where she will examine examine the body of the king, queen, or despot, drawing from the court poet Ronsard and the jurist Estienne de la Boëtie. She hopes to show that the human body both in the jurist’s treatise and in Ronsard’s poetry stands in microcosmically for the body politic, but also models the suppleness of both body and mind essential to the ideal ruler.
Seminar Directors:
Larry Cooper, Professor of Political Science, intends to begin a major new project whose purpose is to explore and explicate several philosophers’ teachings about what, for lack of a better term, he calls statesmanship of the self or soul.
Jessica Keating, Associate Professor of Art History, plans to complete her second book, Impossible Nature: The World of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo (1526-1593) was a Lombard painer and is widely known for the imperial allegories and portraits he executed at the courts of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II (1527-1576) and Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612). The book argues that these pictures present a confused image of sovereignty. While a number of the works can be read as metaphors of the active sovereign who orders all things, others can be understood to be allegories of the sovereign who passively rules.