ABSTRACT
Sovereignty, in the modern sense, is the progenitor of impalpable barriers from which the medieval thinker sought at all costs freedom. Sovereignty, moreover, which was divided between a numbers of coordinate authorities lack for its commands that generality of universal application by which alone it can be distinguished from a private will. This it is which Hobbes saw with relentless clearness; a, to be sovereign, all or nothing. The foundations of sovereignty are, after Rousseau's time, most largely conceived in terms of the synthesis he envisaged. Bentham and Austin, at bottom, did little more than translate the purpose he desired into the special legal institutions adapted to their time. For a legal theory of sovereignty takes its stand upon the beatification of order; and it does not inquire, it is not its business to inquire, into the purposes for which order is maintained. The foundations of sovereignty must strike deeper roots if they are to give us a true philosophy.
