The Realist and the Visionary

When we ask how the concept of sovereignty might become something other than what it has been, we must realise the structural context of the question. If we take liberal legalism as that context, we discover that the concept of sovereignty has a twin in the concept of property. To be sure, when we move beyond the deep grammars of the structure, important conceptual differences quickly emerge. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that if we are to take seriously our concerns with social change and transformation, and ask what concepts like sovereignty and property might become, we must first understand the deeper structural frames from which these concepts take their meaning. Reckoning with the possibilities of sovereign change and transformation is less like altering a small dialect, and more like transforming the syntactical range of an entire language.