ABSTRACT
A whole sub-school of theorizing sovereignty can be traced back to the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Indeed, in his political philosophy, Hegel presents such a coherent account of state sovereignty that even the most traditional of constitutional theorists could find it at least historically significant and perhaps even ostensibly acceptable. But Hegel’s contribution to the theoretical discussion on sovereignty can also be easily misunderstood if one focuses too narrowly on his political philosophy and disregards the unique way in which it is positioned in Hegel’s speculative thinking. For Hegel, the state – the Hegelian mannerism is to capitalize the noun – is a self-conscious ethical substance in which the love that functions as the unifying principle of the family is carried over to the level of civil society. The state is, then, not a separate and external entity, but an extended expression of man’s ethical being. In the public sphere, the unifying principle is, however, complemented by a second principle, namely by the universal principle of conscious and spontaneous volition that is also the ‘absolute aim and content of the knowing subject’ (Hegel 1999a: 507 [§ 535]). The state is ‘the ethical spirit as the manifest substantial will revealed to itself that knows and thinks itself and accomplishes what it knows and in so far as it knows it’ (Hegel 1999b: 207-8 [§ 257]). So if sovereignty is an essential characteristic of the state, then sovereignty is also a manifestation of self-knowledge and of self-consciousness in ethical being. In other words, man’s ethical being is sovereign to the extent that man has achieved full self-knowledge and self-consciousness, and a state can be sovereign only in so far as it is an expression and an extension of man’s sovereign ethical being.
