Theories of Sovereignty: Bodin, Hobbes, Mazzini, and Tocqueville

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

This panel brings together scholarship on the question of sovereignty in modern political thought. Catherine Power returns to the paradigmatic sovereignty theorist, Jean Bodin, to recast his conception of sovereignty as more friendly to pluralism than previously understood. Sarah Greenberg re-reads the Hobbesian covenant through the different representations of the figure of Moses that appear in Leviathan, arguing for Moses as a mediator of covenants. Karen Taliaferro picks up the strands of theological and political arguments about sovereignty in these two papers to work out how Tocqueville’s account of friendship provides a new model of plural life as divine authority recedes into the background of sovereignty debates. Lastly, Theo Christov explores Giuseppe Mazzini’s defense of democratic nationalism as a key development in the history of thought on popular sovereignty, and an important resource for thinking about the construction and maintenance of international peace.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Individual Presentations

• The Many Moses's of Hobbes's Leviathan: Covenant, Sovereignty, and Authority - Sarah Greenberg, Cornell University

• Jean Bodin’s Pluralist Sovereignty? - Catherine R. Power, Glendon College, York University

• Creating Sovereignty: The Social Contract, Religion and Political Friendship - Karen Taliaferro, Arizona State University

• Mazzini on the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism - Theodore Christov, George Washington University

Chair

• Nura Alia Hossainzadeh Stanford University

Discussant

• Christopher Meckstroth University of Cambridge