Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: sovereignty and fire
- 2 The problem: deconstructing sovereignty
- 3 Beyond subject and structure: towards a genealogy of sovereignty
- 4 Inventing outsides: proto-sovereignty, exempla and the general theory of the state in the Renaissance
- 5 How policy became foreign: sovereignty, mathesis and interest in the Classical Age
- 6 Reorganizing reality: sovereignty, modernity and the international
- 7 Conclusion: the end of sovereignty?
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
6 - Reorganizing reality: sovereignty, modernity and the international
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: sovereignty and fire
- 2 The problem: deconstructing sovereignty
- 3 Beyond subject and structure: towards a genealogy of sovereignty
- 4 Inventing outsides: proto-sovereignty, exempla and the general theory of the state in the Renaissance
- 5 How policy became foreign: sovereignty, mathesis and interest in the Classical Age
- 6 Reorganizing reality: sovereignty, modernity and the international
- 7 Conclusion: the end of sovereignty?
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Summary
The old philosophy assigned to man an entirely incorrect standpoint in the world by making him into a machine within the world, a machine which as such was meant to be wholly dependent on the world or on external things and circumstances; in this way it made man into an almost passive part in the world. – Now the Critique of Pure Reason appeared and allotted man a thoroughly active existence in the world. Man himself is the primordial creator of all his representations and concepts and ought to be the unique author of all his deeds.
Kant, Der Streit der FacultätenThe word international, writes Bentham in his Principles (1789), ‘is a new one … sufficiently analogous and intelligible’. What, we must ask, are the conditions that make it intelligible as an object of knowledge? What makes it possible to speak of something international, and to subject it to theoretical and empirical inquiry?
It has been said by historians that the modern theory and practice of the present international system originated somewhere between the end of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic wars, with the waning of absolutism and the rise of the nation-state as the main forces behind its development.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Genealogy of Sovereignty , pp. 186 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995