Conclusion: vocabularies of sovereignty – powers of a paradox

Abstract

Having read the preceding chapters, one will have no problem in concluding that the time of sovereignty is hardly over and that, whatever changes our political or juridical languages may undergo in the foreseeable future, ‘sovereignty’ will remain part of them. Whether this be in terms of naming a good we desire, attacking the inadequacy of some of its institutional realizations, or in other ways trying to make sense of our experience, ‘sovereignty’ will continue to structure and direct our legal and political imagination, hovering, as many of the chapters in this volume highlight, obscurely in the frontier between the two. It is, as Kalmo and Lipping write, precisely this ‘limit’ aspect of sovereignty that intrigues us, the way it points to the insufficiency of ‘law’ or ‘politics’ if considered in their own terms as autonomous languages or self-regulating systems of thought. My sense is that sovereignty's continued attraction – despite the many ways in which we have learned to be critical of its manifestations – depends precisely on the way it points across that boundary into some ‘fundamental’ aspect of the world that we are vaguely aware of but is never quite captured by the normal vocabularies we use to address our political or legal experience. The word ‘transcendental’ might not be out of place here, if only to remember Hans Kelsen's brilliant attempts to resolve the sovereignty puzzle at a time of incipient legal and political collapse.