Sovereignty: A Painful State
Hent Kalmo considers the roots of sovereignty and the changing basis determining the authority of a state to govern itself or another state at the expense of local or individual liberties.
There is a reason why some writers impatient with the idea of sovereignty have taken to calling it the mal de Bodin. The 16th-century French lawyer, who witnessed the flaring up of confessional conflicts and the start of the rapacious expansion of the European powers into other continents, was indeed the first to put into wide circulation the notion of an ‘absolute and perpetual power’. But Jean Bodin was not as great an innovator as he is sometimes made out to be. There already existed a thick web of medieval jurisprudence at the time when he wrote.
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