Chapter I: Preliminary

As the borderland between two kingdoms used in unsettled states of society to be the region where disorder and confusion most prevailed, and in which turbulent men found a refuge from justice, so fallacies and confusions of thought and language have most frequently survived and longest escaped detection in those territories where the limits of conterminous sciences or branches of learning have not been exactly drawn. The frontier districts, if one may call them so, of Ethics, of Law, and of Political Science have been thus infested by a number of vague or ambiguous terms which have provoked many barren discussions and caused much needless trouble to students. The words which serve as technical expressions in adjacent departments of knowledge are sometimes employed in slightly different senses in those different departments; and neither in Ethics nor in Politics has a well-defined terminology become accepted. It is only of late years, when philosophy in becoming less creative has become more critical, that there has been established on the confines of these three sciences a comparatively vigilant police, which is competent, at least in the realm of law, to arrest suspicious phrases and propositions, and subject them to a rigorous examination.

No offender of this kind has given more trouble than the so-called ‘Doctrine of Sovereignty.’ The controversies which it has provoked have been so numerous and so tedious that a reader—even the most patient reader—may feel alarmed at being invited to enter once again that dusty desert of abstractions through which successive generations of political philosophers have thought it necessary to lead their disciples. Let me therefore hasten to say that my aim is to avoid that desert altogether, and approach the question from the concrete side. Instead of attempting to set forth and analyse the doctrines of the great publicists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Bodin, Althaus, Grotius, Hobbes, and the rest—or the dogmas delivered by Bentham and Austin, who represent the school that has had most influence during the last seventy years in England, I will assume the views of these and similar writers to be sufficiently known, and will reserve criticisms upon them till we have seen whether there may not be found a conception and definition of the thing more plain, simple, and conformable to the facts, than could well have been reached by those who, living in the midst of acute political controversies, were really occupied in solving problems which belonged to their own time, and which now, under changed conditions, seem capable of receiving an easier solution. If we succeed in finding such a conception, we may return to inquire why the modern successors of Hobbes, who had not the same need for a theory as he had, worried themselves over what was really a question rather of words than of substance.

It is well to begin by distinguishing the senses in which the word Sovereignty is used. In the ordinary popular sense it means Supremacy, the right to demand obedience. Although the idea of actual power is not absent, the prominent idea is that of some sort of title to exercise control. An ordinary layman would call that person (or body of persons) Sovereign in a State who is obeyed because he is acknowledged to stand at the top, whose will must be expected to prevail, who can get his own way, and make others go his, because such is the practice of the country. Etymologically the word of course means merely superiority[5], and familiar usage applies it in monarchies to the monarch, because he stands first in the State, be his real power great or small.

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Footnote 5:

The heads of monasteries seem to have been sometimes familiarly
described as Sovereigns in the Middle Ages. The name Sovereign was
down till very recent times used to describe the head of a
municipality in several Irish boroughs. Probably other similar
instances might be collected.

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