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Sovereign Power. Sovereign has everything to do with power. It often describes a person who has supreme power or authority, such as a king or queen. God is described as "sovereign" in a number of Bible translations.
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sovereignty, in political theory, the ultimate overseer, or authority, in the decision-making process of the state and in the maintenance of order. The concept of sovereignty—one of the most controversial ideas in political science and international law—is closely related to the difficult concepts of state and government and of independence and dem...
In 16th-century France Jean Bodin (1530–96) used the new concept of sovereignty to bolster the power of the French king over the rebellious feudal lords, facilitating the transition from feudalism to nationalism. The thinker who did the most to provide the term with its modern meaning was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who argued that in every true state some person or body of persons must have the ultimate and absolute authority to declare the law; to divide this authority, he held, was essentially to destroy the unity of the state. The theories of the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78)—that the state is based upon a formal or informal compact of its citizens, a social contract through which they entrust such powers to a government as may be necessary for common protection—led to the development of the doctrine of popular sovereignty that found expression in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. Another twist was given to this concept by the statement in the French constitution of 1791 that “Sovereignty is one, indivisible, unalienable and imprescriptible; it belongs to the Nation; no group can attribute sovereignty to itself nor can an individual arrogate it to himself.” Thus, the idea of popular sovereignty exercised primarily by the people became combined with the idea of national sovereignty exercised not by an unorganized people in the state of nature, but by a nation embodied in an organized state. In the 19th century the English jurist John Austin (1790–1859) developed the concept further by investigating who exercises sovereignty in the name of the people or of the state; he concluded that sovereignty is vested in a nation’s parliament. A parliament, he argued, is a supreme organ that enacts laws binding upon everybody else but that is not itself bound by the laws and could change these laws at will. This description, however, fitted only a particular system of government, such as the one that prevailed in Great Britain during the 19th century.
Austin’s notion of legislative sovereignty did not entirely fit the American situation. The Constitution of the United States, the fundamental law of the federal union, did not endow the national legislature with supreme power but imposed important restrictions upon it. A further complication was added when the Supreme Court of the United States asserted successfully in Marbury v. Madison (1803) its right to declare laws unconstitutional through a procedure called judicial review. Although this development did not lead to judicial sovereignty, it seemed to vest the sovereign power in the fundamental document itself, the Constitution. This system of constitutional sovereignty was made more complex by the fact that the authority to propose changes in the Constitution and to approve them was vested not only in Congress but also in states and in special conventions called for that purpose. Thus, it could be argued that sovereignty continued to reside in the states or in the people, who retained all powers not delegated by the Constitution to the United States or expressly prohibited by the Constitution to the states or the people (Tenth Amendment). Consequently, the claims by advocates of states’ rights that states continued to be sovereign were bolstered by the difficulty of finding a sole repository of sovereignty in a complex federal structure; and the concept of dual sovereignty of both the union and the component units found a theoretical basis. Even if the competing theory of popular sovereignty—the theory that vested sovereignty in the people of the United States—was accepted, it still might be argued that this sovereignty need not be exercised on behalf of the people solely by the national government but could be divided on a functional basis between the federal and state authorities.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Sovereign is the one who exercises power without limitation. Sovereignty is essentially the power to make laws, even as Blackstone defined it. The term also carries implications of autonomy; to have sovereign power is to be beyond the power of others to interfere.
The meaning of SOVEREIGNTY is supreme power especially over a body politic. How to use sovereignty in a sentence.
In international law, sovereignty is the exercise of power by a state. De jure sovereignty refers to the legal right to do so; de facto sovereignty refers to the factual ability to do so.
The supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power by which an independent state is governed and from which all specific political powers are derived; the intentional independence of a state, combined with the right and power of regulating its internal affairs without foreign interference.
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Law is what sovereigns command, and it cannot limit their power: sovereign power is absolute. In the international sphere this condition led to a perpetual state of war, as sovereigns tried to impose their will by force on all other sovereigns.
