“In America, the people govern, the people rule, and the people are sovereign.” So said President Donald Trump in his inaugural speech to the United Nations in September 2017. “In foreign affairs, we are renewing this founding principle of sovereignty. Our government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens… As President of the United States, I will always put America first.” Trump used the terms “sovereign” and “sovereignty” some twenty-one times in his U.N. address. As this brief quote suggests, the meaning of these terms shifted throughout his remarks: first Trump said that the people govern, then he said that those who govern must protect the people, and finally he said that the nation would act in its self-interest. Sovereignty is a concept as much used as little understood in contemporary political discourse. In purely secular terms, sovereignty is the right to rule and to make the rules. Even if we can offer secular accounts of the concept of sovereignty today, the concept’s origins, at least in Western thought, are hardly secular. The sovereign of all sovereigns, of course, is a monotheistic God, at least within the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And the paradigmatic assertion of (and submission to) sovereignty is God’s inexplicable command to Abraham to slay his son Isaac. Kierkegaard called this the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” under which justice and reason must give way to the duty to obey the absolute sovereignty of God. Earthly sovereignty is either a pale copy of Divine sovereignty or takes its authority from Divine delegation or approbation. It is no accident that Romans 13:1 was a favorite prooftext for magistrates and would-be sovereigns: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” Relying on such theological arguments, European monarchs insisted on the Divine Right of Kings: on their right to rule and to make the rules, and indeed on the absoluteness, indivisibility, and non-accountability of their power, at least while on earth. After all, God himself ordained their status. This example suggests that one of the most frequent and important features of sovereignty is its ideological function. Claims of sovereignty mystify claims of authority. They disguise what is really going on in a political situation. Assertions of sovereignty are often designed to give the impression that one has the right to rule and to make the rules, and that others cannot and should not interfere with that right. As an ideological concept, sovereignty’s purpose is to generate a false belief in justified subordination to those claiming sovereign authority. The confusions and mystifications of sovereignty emerge from its totalizing rhetoric. In practice, however, sovereignty is always partial and incomplete, hemmed in and limited by other forms of power. No one and no thing — with the exception of the Almighty, of course — is fully and truly sovereign. (And as Milton vividly portrayed in Paradise Lost, even God can face rebellion from his disgruntled angels.) Everyone, to the extent that it even makes sense to call them sovereign, is sovereign only to a certain degree, whether conceptual or empirical. Claims of sovereignty are always bumping up against competing claims by others, a bit like the three mental patients in Milton Rokeach’s The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, each of whom claimed to be Jesus. Countries within the international system often complain about unjustified intrusions on their sovereignty, insisting that they be left alone or that they can take justified retaliation against those intrusions. Needless to say, those countries in conflict with them make similar claims. Whether these claims make theoretical sense, they are central to contemporary international relations. Both American conservatives and American progressives sometimes argue that it is important to protect our national sovereignty from foreign encroachments and from international law, though, of course, they may offer very different examples. At the same time, people assert the importance of “state sovereignty” within the United States to limit the very same federal government that is supposed to be sovereign with respect to international institutions. It’s all very confusing. Scholars have often noticed the ideological functions of sovereignty and criticized them. In his book on popular sovereignty, Edmund Morgan pronounced the idea to be nothing more than a fiction, used by power-grabbing politicians seeking to legitimate their claims to power. Many years ago Steven Krasner pleaded with political scientists to drop the term because it had no empirical validity. More recently, Don Herzog argued that we should stop talking about “sovereignty” altogether. It is not a meaningful concept, he explains, because almost no one in the contemporary world still believes in the normative desirability of an absolute, indivisible, and unaccountable power attached to any earthly authority. The concept was invented and theoretically elaborated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a device for bringing the savage European wars of religion to an end. As part of that arrangement, sovereign princes henceforth would get to determine the one true religion that would be accepted within their domains. Cuius regio, eius religio, as the saying went. Yet even as European monarchs were proclaiming their Divine right to rule, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes were undermining religious claims to sovereignty and attacking them as dangerous. This led to the rise of a new conception of sovereignty located not in individual monarchs but in an imagined collectivity called the people. 
After the collapse of the Divine Right of Kings, a new ideological formation arose to take its place. This idea is popular sovereignty. The early medieval phrase Vox populi, vox Dei — the voice of the people is the voice of God — might suggest that, like the sovereignty of kings, popular sovereignty can similarly be justified on theological grounds. In fact, the phrase was originally used to ridicule the pretensions of popular sovereignty: before it came to be used in an anti-monarchical spirit, it was deployed to suggest that it is both
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