Inventing the Sovereign State

The story of the modern state can be told in several ways. However, the most glaring problem we face when attempting any sort of genealogical reconstruction of its origins is that we often speak through the language that is bequeathed to us by modernity, thus inhibiting any sort of sustained critique. This is evident in the ways we speak about nodal foundational modern concepts such as sovereignty. Rather than inquiring whose sovereignty, we need to critically re-examine the concept itself. In telling a story that accounts for concepts like sovereignty, we can also think through the possibility of a politics without sovereignty and the implications that such a politics would have on liberatory politics. Telling the story of modern sovereignty would illuminate the ways in which sovereignty is the product of a distinctly Eurocentric metaphysical imagination. The question before us, then, is as follows: what are the metaphysical assumptions that make the concept of sovereignty thinkable in the first place? Second, can we think about a politics without sovereignty?

This critique must make use of political theology because, as Adam Kotsko has shown, the most immediate task of any political theology is to critically interrogate the sources from which a political authority demands obedience. Political theology is useful because it employs genealogy as critique. It is important to pursue an alternate starting point because the prevailing narratives of the legitimacy of modernity make the claim that its act of totalization and fetishization is nothing but an instance of self-assertion and the sovereignty of reason in an ostensibly post-metaphysical world. The problem with this claim, however, is that if such a subject (e.g., reason) already existed then why would it need to be founded and legitimated in the first place? It is because, as Marc Lombardo explains, it was not there in the first place and had to be fabricated. Thus, we are in need of an alternate story of how the sovereign was founded and legitimated in the first place.

Joseph Albernaz and Kirill Chepurin provide a starting point, arguing that modernity is more than just a project of human self-assertion or the sovereignty of reason. In “The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology,” they argue that the autonomy of human self-assertion is, in fact, possible only because modernity “reoccupies the sovereignty of God with that of the world.” Modernity did not do away with transcendence but rather it transposed it onto the world. The quintessential characteristic of modernity was to identify the world with the “totality of possibilities.” Furthermore, they explain that this emergent order is not eternal nor natural but rather a historical response to a pervasive consciousness of insecurity. This ontological insecurity emerged from several factors, a significant aspect of which was the emergence of nominalism. The nominalist God was an alien God, unreachable and whose will unfathomable. The idea was that a God so radically differentiated from an alienated world was “pragmatically as good as dead.” In the face of this glaring contingency and alienation, man was forced to construct a “counter world” on two levels: first, at the level of the material world now perceived as a space of pure power, and second, at the level of the political world now perceived as a lawless state of nature. The sovereign state, as its own counter world, would emerge, via modernity, as the primary means for countering the contingency and chaos of the state of nature.

What are the origins of this political counter world and what are its philosophical justifications? The answer is in the relationship between the two counter worlds: the world that is a space of pure power and the political space that is part of that world. This, however, is not the story that dominant narratives of modernity tell us and that is precisely why they need to be interrogated. The common narrative is of a world filled with sacraments and intra-cosmic gods and that the secular was a “purely human” space waiting to be occupied once man was released from the grips of religion and superstition. This is also known as the subtraction thesis, which makes the claim that the modern world is a world bereft of superstition and bondage to premodern traditionalism. In other words, that the secular is what is discovered (rather than created) when man asserted rational thinking in the face of dogmas. John Millbank, however, reminds us in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason that “once, there was no secular” and that the secular had to be imagined and created in both theory and practice. According to Ángela Iranzo Dosdad, the creation of the secular did not amount to an abandonment of sacralisation but rather the absolutisation and sacralisation of the world itself. As Milbank goes onto to argue, “Through this process of creation, it had to introduce three ‘autonomous’ objects. The first being the ‘natural’ that are governed by natural laws and as such is a “sealed off totality.” This process of automization was not limited to the natural world and sphere of knowledge, or social theory, but was extended and forged for itself a new autonomous object: the political as a field of “pure power.”

The critical point to make here is that the “political” was not a space—out there—already autonomous, only waiting to be occupied. Its autonomy had to be imagined before it could be occupied and closed onto itself. Furthermore, as Albernaz and Chepurin have observed, the pervasive consciousness of insecurity that animated a response to a world alienated from God is transposed onto the political space wherein the political world becomes as intelligible and manipulable as the material world. It was from this field of pure power and the need to secure order over and against the “pre-political” world that the concept of sovereignty emerged, creating the impression that it is inextricable from any symbolic order, rather than recognizing it to be a distinctly Eurocentric concept. The politics of sovereignty is inextricable from the metaphysics of modernity. That is to say, not only does Modernity invent sovereignty as a political principle but that in its totalization of the world, it makes thinking about a worldly sovereign possible in the first place. In short, sovereignty is the projection of an image of the world as a space of pure power onto the political space needing, like the material world, manipulability.  

 Thus far, we have seen how political theology can unearth the latent metaphysical assumptions that inform the concept of sovereignty. More so, it reveals the extent to which sovereignty, rather than being a structural imperative of the political, has its origins in a distinctly Eurocentric metaphysics. This, now, allows us to revisit the question: is it possible to conceive of a politics without sovereignty? And what are its implications for liberatory politics? It is becoming increasingly impossible to do so, Dosdad argues, because the immanentization of the world reduces politics to a horizontal axis stripped of any relation to transcendent dimension of being. Under the metaphysical horizons of an invented secular, there can be no transcendence through God. The secular spaces of pure power becomes spaces of sovereignty, spatial and temporal dimensions wherein power is deployed as modalities of oppression.

 The question before us is then: How can we think beyond the secular and beyond the politics of sovereignty? This brings to fore another question: what are alternative ways of engaging with the problem of man and contingency? These questions, however, brings us to an impasse, given that the genre of political theology is largely a Western discipline limiting both the scope of our inquiry and the possible sources of alternative conceptions of the political. Perhaps we need to look elsewhere: the Islamic tradition. This brings us to a second line of critique, one that is normative, grounded in the Qur’anic tradition that can complement our genealogical critique. From a critical Islamic perspective, the conditions that facilitated the invention of sovereignty also create the conditions for the emergence of second-creators and the socio-political and economic realities that they create, which in turn alienates man from the “God-given” self and from the First-Creator. In the Qur’an, this refers to the tāghūt which literally means the one who transgresses. Toshihiko Isutzu describes the tāghūt as having “lost this sense of creatureliness” and as such is bound to transgress its proper place in the divine order. The Qur’an identifies the origins of such transgression as a form of istigna which refers to the illusion of independence and self-sufficiency in a godless world.

Rustam Approaching the Tents of King Kubad; Page from a Manuscript of the Shahnama

Sovereignty as a political principle emerges from a need for a symbolic order that mirrors what it deems to be permanent. In this act of mirroring, man had to resemble God, Jacques Maritain explains, so that the image of the sovereign is one who “transcends the political whole just as God transcends the cosmos” and that such power is “separate and transcendent—not at the peak but above . . . ruling the entire body political from above.” According to Albernaz and Chepurin, the result of this self-proclaimed sufficiency and transcendent creation of a logic of “possibility qua manipulability.” Instead of “reconstruct[ing] an order given in nature”, it “reduce[s] nature forcibly to an order imputed to it by man.” In thinking about sovereignty through an alternate politics, it would do us well to pay heed to the warnings of Muslim thinkers like Sherman B. Jackson: “the proper response to the problem of human contingency is not to seek to overcome it but to resist and oppose false mysterium tremendum and “re-creation,” both as subjects and as objects.”  In thinking through the genealogical origins of modernity and considering alternative interventions for critique, what had become unthinkable—a politics without sovereignty—enters the horizon of possibility.

Ali S. Harfouch is a writer and researcher focusing on secularity, contemporary Islamic thought, and political theology. He obtained his Master of Arts in Political Science from the American University of Beirut.