Sovereignty The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept [Hardcover]

Dieter Grimm teaches constitutional law at Humboldt University Berlin and at the Yale Law School. From 1987 to 1999, he served as justice of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany.

Belinda Cooper is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York and an adjunct professor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs and Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights. She is an expert on human rights, women's rights, and international and transitional justice and has written for a wide variety of publications in German and English.Dieter Grimm's accessible introduction to the concept of sovereignty ties the evolution of the idea to historical events, from the religious conflicts of sixteenth-century Europe to today's trends in globalization and transnational institutions. Grimm wonders whether recent political changes have undermined notions of national sovereignty, comparing manifestations of the concept in different parts of the world. Geared for classroom use, the study maps various notions of sovereignty in relation to the people, the nation, the state, and the federation, distinguishing between internal and external types of sovereignty. Grimm's book will appeal to political theorists and cultural-studies scholars and to readers interested in the role of charisma, power, originality, and individuality in political rule.In this elegant essay, Grimm surveys the thousand-year history of the idea of sovereignty – emphasizing its changing meanings as Western ideas of political legitimacy transform themselves over the centuries. Grimm's work is the first on this subject that combines historical mastery with a sense of the present need to redefine our political understandings.This is a concise and excellent book, which will be useful not only for students of legal and political thought, but for historians as well as cultural theorists.The old and moldy idea of sovereignty is broughtlc,