Review Essay
Abstract
Don Herzog’s book Sovereignty RIP offers a tour d’horizon of one strand of sovereignty’s conceptual history and its changing meanings over time. It culminates in a ferocious call to bury the notion of sovereignty and replace it with concepts such as jurisdiction, authority and state. Based on insights from conceptual history, in particular about basic concepts, the review essay criticizes Herzog’s approach. It questions whether one can convincingly denounce the concept of sovereignty by relying predominantly on episodes from Anglo-American history as Herzog does. Instead, the essay tells two alternative stories in order to first argue that ignoring other narratives risks misunderstanding and misinterpreting the current re-rise of sovereignty-related discourses and that, second, sovereignty remains an important tool to understand how both the constitutional state and multilevel governance work. Eventually it would be more pernicious to discard the concept of sovereignty instead of engaging with it and confronting its diverging conceptions.
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