Author: Haroon Khalil

Indivisibility as a characteristic of sovereignty can be said to emerge as a logical deduction of the characteristic of absoluteness. If sovereignty is absolute, it has to be characterized by unity, otherwise it will be logically inconsistent. As Jellinek remarks ‘a divided, fragmented, diminished, limited, relative sovereignty’ is contradictory. If law is the command of the sovereign,…

Theorists like Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau and Austin have emphasized the absoluteness or illimitability of sovereignty. Absoluteness refers to power which is not restricted or limited by any consideration or authority internally and also externally. The sovereign cannot be limited or restricted by any law, moral or social considerations, customs and historical traditions, the law of nature, natural…

Understood in a legal sense, sovereignty has certain characteristics that define its nature and also its importance in relation to the State. Sovereignty is a special element of the State and its characteristics also define the nature of the State. As our survey of the development of the concept of sovereignty suggests, the following characteristics are…

Austin’s theory of sovereignty mainly involves three inter-related propositions—first, the location of sovereignty in a determinate human superior; second, the legal superiority of sovereign authority and the finality of positive law in the form of law as the command of the sovereign; and third, the indivisibility and absoluteness of sovereignty. By the very fact of assigning final legal authority…

While Hobbes and Bentham championed the concept of legal sovereignty, it is John Austin (1790–1859), an English jurist, in whose hand it gets its fullest expression. Furthermore, as Vincent maintains, like Bodin and Hobbes, Austin also identified the sovereign with the State.24 John Austin in his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1832) formulated his concept of sovereignty. According to Garner,…

Jeremy Bentham Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), an English utilitarian, is famous for his advocacy of modern legislation. By grounding his theory of ‘Utility’ in the doctrine of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers’, Bentham assigned the State the task of the promotion and maintenance of ‘Utility’. His two works, A Fragment on Government (1776) and An Introduction to…

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the French contractualist, is regarded to have contributed to the concept of sovereignty by formulating his doctrine of General Will. The doctrine of General Will, along with Rousseau’s revolt against reason, romanticized and rediscovered the community in contrast to atomic individualism. The General Will grounded in the community became the basis of…

John Locke (1632–1704), an English thinker and social contractualist, is not identified with the theory of absolute sovereignty. His understanding of the social contract and the state of nature led Locke to formulate a theory of sovereignty which was different from that of Hobbes. In his Two Treatises of Government (1690) he formulated his theory of social contract…

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is considered to be the theorist of ‘absolute sovereignty’. He grounded the nature and powers of the sovereign on the necessities entailed by the state of nature. His argued that the state of nature and the formulation of the instinct of self-preservation in individuals led to the origin of the State. Uncertainty…

Discussions of the three writers mentioned previously suggest that during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (in Europe), the concept of sovereignty had been discussed in three forms, namely, national sovereignty (Bodin), popular sovereignty (Althusius) and external sovereignty (Grotius). Furthermore, we find that the concept of natural law played important role both in terms of…