Sovereignty

In Our Time: Philosophy

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2016

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the idea of Sovereignty, the authority of a state to govern itself and the relationship between the sovereign and the people. These ideas of external and internal sovereignty were imagined in various ways in ancient Greece and Rome, and given a name in 16th Century France by the philosopher and jurist Jean Bodin in his Six Books of the Commonwealth, where he said (in an early English translation) 'Maiestie or Soveraigntie is the most high, absolute, and perpetuall power over the citisens and subiects in a Commonweale: which the Latins cal Maiestatem, the Greeks akra exousia, kurion arche, and kurion politeuma; the Italians Segnoria, and the Hebrewes tomech shévet, that is to say, The greatest power to command.' Shakespeare also explored the concept through Richard II and the king's two bodies, Hobbes developed it in the 17th Century, and the idea of popular sovereignty was tested in the Revolutionary era in America and France. With Melissa Lane Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University Richard Bourke Professor in the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London and Tim Stanton Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about in our time and for
0:05.0	recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC in Our Time.
0:10.0	I hope you enjoy the programs.
0:12.0	Hello in 1576, the French political philosopher Jean Baudin
0:16.6	set out his ideas about the nature of sovereignty in what became a landmark work,
0:21.2	the six books of the Commonwealth. He was writing at a time of great
0:25.0	conflict in France, the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants, and a few
0:29.2	years before the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. With kings, princes, the pope and aristocrats
0:34.8	making overlapping claims for authority, Bodan wanted to find the defining qualities
0:39.9	of the one supreme sovereign in a state. His ideas about sovereignty drawn
0:44.3	Aristotle and profoundly influenced later thinkers such as Hobbs during the
0:47.7	English Civil War, Russo ahead of the French Revolution, the leaders of the
0:51.8	American Revolution, and we stop short of current affairs.
0:55.7	Women to discuss the history of the idea of sovereignty are Melissa Lane, Class of
1:00.6	1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, Richard Burke. Class of Senior Lecture in the Department of Politics at the University of York.
1:13.8	Melissa Lane, Bona read about the ancient Greeks.
1:17.8	What would you have found, though, that would have helped him in his political theory?
1:21.0	Of course in ancient Greece and across the ancient world we have sovereigns in the sense of monarchs, but what Bodin was also very struck by was that in the Greek democracies we find what we can think of as popular sovereignty, where the people are sovereign.
1:37.0	And the advantage of the people over monarchs is that they're not underage ever, they don't
1:41.6	get senile, so they have more claim in some ways to be absolute,
1:46.8	supreme, perpetual, and even indivisible, which were some of the key marks of sovereignty
1:52.1	that Bodin identified.
	...

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