Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
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Richard Joyce
Richard Joyce is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia. He teaches and researches in the areas of international law and legal theory. His bookCompeting Sovereignties was published by Routledge in 2013. Prior to his appointment to Monash, he taught at the University of Reading, University College London, King's College London and Birkbeck College. Dr Joyce completed his PhD in the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2009.
Abstract
This article compares two different primal scenes which give rise to human sovereignty: Hobbes's state of nature and Milton's Edenic paradise. The article briefly compares key differences but its main focus is to uncover surprising resonances between Milton and Hobbes. It does so to reveal two under-appreciated aspects of Hobbes's account of sovereignty. The first, drawing on James Martel's reading of Leviathan, is that Hobbes's terrestrial sovereignty is not of itself (and does not lead to) a culmination of human potential, but rather exists within a wider eschatology awaiting the second coming of Christ. The second, drawing on the work of Peter Fitzpatrick, is that Hobbes is ambivalent on the crucial question of whether the founding event is actually transformative (an ambivalence he shares with Milton). The article concludes by departing from Martel's view that Leviathan points towards a non-sovereign politics and argues instead that it contains the seeds of a radical re-conception of sovereignty itself.
About the author
Richard Joyce is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia. He teaches and researches in the areas of international law and legal theory. His book Competing Sovereignties was published by Routledge in 2013. Prior to his appointment to Monash, he taught at the University of Reading, University College London, King's College London and Birkbeck College. Dr Joyce completed his PhD in the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2009.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Book Review
