In this elegant essay, Grimm surveys the thousand-year history of the idea of sovereignty – emphasizing its changing meanings as Western ideas of political legitimacy transform themselves over the centuries. Grimm's work is the first on this subject that combines historical mastery with a sense of the present need to redefine our political understandings. (Bruce Ackerman, Yale Law School)
This is a concise and excellent book, which will be useful not only for students of legal and political thought, but for historians as well as cultural theorists. (Seyla Benhabib, Yale University)
The old and moldy idea of sovereignty is brought back to life in this engaging study by a major German legal thinker and former Supreme Court Justice. Against those who advance simplistic and even dismissive views of sovereignty, Grimm's masterful conceptual history reminds us of how rich, complicated, and multisided ideas about sovereignty have been. And in opposition to those who would prefer to toss sovereignty into the ashcan of intellectual history, Grimm recalls the pivotal role sovereignty, when properly understood, can play in protecting democracy and self-government. A must-read for political scientists, legal and constitutional theorists, and anyone else interested in the changing contours of political authority in our globalizing world. (William E. Scheuerman, Indiana University)
Drawing from both a keen historical recollection of the conceptual transformations of "sovereignty" and a lucid overview of current debates (each a sterling contribution in itself), Grimm shows us a democracy-based case for retention and adaptation of state sovereignty as a first principle of politics, even in today's decidedly post-Westphalian world and even as necessarily shorn of some salient traditional associations so as to fit this world's realities. (Frank I. Michelman, Harvard Law School)