Sovereignty and the Persistence of the Aesthetic

Abstract

British constitutional thought tends to understand sovereignty in legalistic terms, with the concept often equated with the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. As Loughlin and Tierney have recently argued, this approach obscures the political considerations which undergird the legal precept. In this article we argue that this approach misses a third, and essentially important, dimension to sovereignty. Law, politics and aesthetics all play equally important parts in constituting the essential structure of the concept. We elaborate this claim through a reading of some prominent accounts of sovereignty within the history of political modernity. At bottom, aesthetics is concerned with the ways in which the body's senses are stimulated and ordered; it therefore includes pictorial representation, ideation and imagination, as well as affect, instinct and habituated feeling. We argue that these different elements are usefully understood as all pertaining to a distinctive, and persistent, aesthetic dimension which is essential to the sovereignty concept.