Sovereignty as Responsibility

Abstract

Rousseau placed sovereignty at the center of his account of political legitimacy and human freedom, but most democratic theorists in the twenty-first century set out to defang or altogether eliminate sovereignty. We argue that not only is the concept and practice of sovereignty ineliminable, but it also offers the crucial site for emancipatory politics. Sovereignty affords the bridge between the genealogical project of diagnosing unfreedom found in the Discourse on Inequality and the normative project of self-legislation found in the Social Contract. Sovereignty is the moment where we take responsibility for our past—the sedimentation of normative injury that is our history of unfreedom—and self-consciously repair these wounds through new legislation.