Editing Sovereignty (section)

===Age of Enlightenment===
During the [[Age of Enlightenment]], the idea of sovereignty gained both legal and moral force as the main Western description of the meaning and power of a State. In particular, the "[[Social contract]]" as a mechanism for establishing sovereignty was suggested and, by 1800, widely accepted, especially in the new [[United States]] and [[France]], though also in [[1800 in Great Britain|Great Britain]] to a lesser extent.

[[Thomas Hobbes]], in ''[[Leviathan (Hobbes book)|Leviathan]]'' (1651) put forward a conception of sovereignty similar to Bodin's, which had just achieved legal status in the "[[Peace of Westphalia]]", but for different reasons. He created the first modern version of the social contract (or contractarian) theory, arguing that to overcome the "nasty, brutish and short" quality of life without the cooperation of other human beings, people must join in a "commonwealth" and submit to a "Soveraigne{{sic}} Power" that can compel them to act in the common good. Hobbes was thus the first to write that relations between the people and the sovereign were based on negotiation rather than natural submission.<ref name=":Laikwan2">{{Cite book |last=Laikwan |first=Pang |title=One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty |date=2024 |publisher=[[Stanford University Press]] |isbn=9781503638815 |location=Stanford, CA}}</ref>{{Rp|page=10}} His expediency argument attracted many of the early proponents of sovereignty. Hobbes strengthened the definition of sovereignty beyond either Westphalian or Bodin's, by saying that it must be:{{Citation needed|date=January 2011}}<ref>{{Cite web |last=Philpott |first=Daniel |date=Fall 2020 |title=Sovereignty |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/sovereignty/ |access-date=2023-08-16 |website=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy}}</ref>
* Absolute: because conditions could only be imposed on a sovereign if there were some outside arbitrator to determine when he had violated them, in which case the sovereign would not be the final authority.
* Indivisible: The sovereign is the only final authority in his territory; he does not share final authority with any other entity. Hobbes held this to be true because otherwise there would be no way of resolving a disagreement between the multiple authorities.

Hobbes' hypothesis—that the ruler's sovereignty is contracted to him by the people in return for his maintaining their physical safety—led him to conclude that if and when the ruler fails, the people recover their ability to protect themselves by forming a new contract.

Hobbes's theories decisively shape the concept of sovereignty through the medium of [[social contract]] theories. [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]'s (1712–1778) definition of [[popular sovereignty]] (with early antecedents in [[Francisco Suárez]]'s theory of the origin of power), provides that the people are the legitimate sovereign. Rousseau considered sovereignty to be inalienable; he condemned the distinction between the origin and the exercise of sovereignty, a distinction upon which [[constitutional monarchy]] or [[representative democracy]] is founded. [[John Locke]], and [[Montesquieu]] are also key figures in the unfolding of the concept of sovereignty; their views differ with Rousseau and with Hobbes on this issue of alienability.

The second book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ''[[Du Contrat Social, ou Principes du droit politique]]'' (1762) deals with sovereignty and its rights. Sovereignty, or the [[general will]], is inalienable, for the will cannot be transmitted; it is indivisible since it is essentially general; it is infallible and always right, determined and limited in its power by the common interest; it acts through laws. Law is the decision of the general will regarding some object of common interest, but though the general will is always right and desires only good, its judgment is not always enlightened, and consequently does not always see wherein the common good lies; hence the necessity of the legislator. But the legislator has, of himself, no authority; he is only a guide who drafts and proposes laws, but the people alone (that is, the sovereign or general will) has authority to make and impose them.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Social Contract and Discourses|url=https://archive.org/details/thesocialcontrac46333gut|last1=Cole|first1=G.D.H.|last2=Rousseau|first2=Jean-Jacques|year=2018|orig-year=1762|publisher=Project Gutenberg|via=[[Internet Archive]]}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|title=The Social Contract|last=Rousseau|first=Jean-Jacques|url=http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf|publisher=Jonathan Bennett|year=2017|orig-year=1762|via=earlymoderntexts.com}}</ref>

Rousseau, in the ''Social Contract''<ref>''Social Contract'', Book II, Chapter III.
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argued, "the growth of the State giving the trustees of public authority more and means to abuse their power, the more the Government has to have force to contain the people, the more force the Sovereign should have in turn to contain the Government," with the understanding that the Sovereign is "a collective being of wonder" (Book II, Chapter I) resulting from "the general will" of the people, and that "what any man, whoever he may be, orders on his own, is not a law" (Book II, Chapter VI) – and predicated on the assumption that the people have an unbiased means by which to ascertain the general will.  Thus the legal maxim, "there is no law without a sovereign."<ref name="max-seydel">{{Cite web| url = https://archive.org/details/asocietystatess00stalgoog | page = [https://archive.org/details/asocietystatess00stalgoog/page/n104 80] | quote = there is no law without a sovereign Seydel. | title = A society of states: Or, Sovereignty, independence, and equality in a league of nations | publisher = G. Routledge & sons, Limited | last1 = Stallybrass | first1 = William Teulon Swan | year = 1918}}</ref>

According to [[Hendrik Spruyt]], the sovereign state emerged as a response to changes in international trade (forming coalitions that wanted sovereign states)<ref name=":1" /> so that the sovereign state's emergence was not inevitable; "it arose because of a particular conjuncture of social and political interests in Europe."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Spruyt|first=Hendrik|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzxx91t|title=The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change|date=1994|volume=176|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0-691-03356-3|pages=18–19|doi=10.2307/j.ctvzxx91t|jstor=j.ctvzxx91t|s2cid=221904936}}</ref>

Once states are recognized as sovereign, they are rarely recolonized, merged, or dissolved.<ref>{{Citation|last=Strang|first=David|title=Contested sovereignty: the social construction of colonial imperialism|date=1996|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/state-sovereignty-as-social-construct/contested-sovereignty-the-social-construction-of-colonial-imperialism/A95771700FB31411013256C3E5DA4344|work=State Sovereignty as Social Construct|pages=25|editor-last=Weber|editor-first=Cynthia|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-56599-8|editor2-last=Biersteker|editor2-first=Thomas J.}}</ref>