The Scaffolding of Sovereignty

The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests.

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is professor of history at New York University and the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (2005) and The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (2009).


Stefanos Geroulanos is associate professor of history and director of the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at New York University. He is the author of An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (2010) and Transparency in Postwar France (2017).

Nicole Jerr is assistant professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy.

Jerrold Seigel, William J. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History Emeritus at New York University.:
This is a wide-ranging, stimulating, challenging collection of essays.

Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine:
Joining performance studies with philosophy, theology, and ethnography, the figure of the scaffold aptly evokes the symbolic supports and global visibility of sovereignty today. The contributors to this ambitious collection of essays fearlessly disclose recurrent features of sovereignty across time and space, often beginning immanently with the cosmic cartographies generated by particular regimes and projected in aesthetic displays, liturgical exercises, and citational enterprises that reveal common themes in the global drama of majesty.

Lauren Benton, author of A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in World History, 1400–1900:
This volume showcases the best of global intellectual history. Sovereignty emerges as a complex force: aesthetically layered, politically mutable, historically contingent, and consistently elusive. At the same time, despite the apparent Eurocentrism of the concept's recent lineage, readers will come away convinced of the importance of sovereignty as an analytical category, key to making sense of political culture in world history and political thought in global context.

Samuel Moyn, Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History, Harvard University:
That sovereign power is often fragile and never established once and for all is the startling proposition that organizes this spectacularly interesting sequence of investigations. Sovereignty is impossible to study, the essays propose, without attention to its ‘scaffolding,’ defined as all the symbolic management that power continually requires. Leaping across time and spanning the world, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty showcases scholarly gems that together reflect how the crown of sovereignty is kept in place—and sometimes slips.