Jean Bodin built the theory of sovereignty out of France's religious wars
Reacting to the chaos of the French wars of religion in the late sixteenth century, Jean Bodin argued that every state needs a single supreme power, absolute and perpetual, able to make law without its subjects' consent. His treatise is often seen as the first European text to theorise state sovereignty.
Bodin reasoned that sovereignty had to be perpetual, since anyone able to impose a time limit on the ruler would be superior to it. A sovereign could not be bound by predecessors' laws or, logically, by its own. Yet he stopped short of total licence. The sovereign remained subject to divine law, natural law and the common law of nations, and Bodin advised taking counsel from a senate, delegating to magistrates and using the Estates to communicate with the people. He allowed that sovereignty could rest with a monarch, an aristocracy or the people, though he preferred monarchy.
The underlying idea is older. Roman jurists recorded that the people had transferred their power to the emperor, that the emperor was not bound by the laws, and that his pleasure had the force of law; Ulpian described this near-absolute authority without naming it sovereignty. Medieval kings, by contrast, shared power with their feudal nobles and were hemmed in by custom. The word itself entered English in the fourteenth century from a Vulgar Latin form meaning chief or ruler, built on super, over, and its spelling was bent by association with reign.
Enlightenment writers gave the concept moral as well as legal force, and by 1800 the social contract was widely accepted as its foundation, especially in the United States and France. Modern analysis splits it into parts. Stephen Krasner distinguishes domestic control, control over movement across borders, formal recognition by other states, and the absence of any outside authority inside the state, noting that a country can have some of these without the others. Lawyers also separate de jure sovereignty, the legal right to rule, from de facto sovereignty, the practical ability.
The United Nations Charter rests on the sovereign equality of members and bars intervention in essentially domestic matters, while allowing Security Council enforcement. The UN once stressed legal sovereignty but has shifted toward empirical capacity, such as whether a government can actually run a port, regulate oil exploration or issue identity documents.
Source: Sovereignty
