National Sovereignty

[SwimExpert]

Well. . .truthfully, the MOST conservative (or classically liberal if you prefer) position is that the individual alone is sovereign.

Actually, no. That's neither conservative nor classically liberal. It's just plain fuckery, born from ignorant obtuseness.

It's the principle that the revolution was fought on. The government gets it's authority based on the just rights of the governed, not based upon the right of a sovereign king.

No, moron. The Revolutionary War was fought over the principle of taxation without representation. You may have missed it, but Magna Carta placed actual governing power with Parliament, not the Monarch. When the colonies rebelled it wasn't because they objected to constitutional monarchy, or even monarchy in general. They objected to the levying of taxes by a Parliament in which they held no representation.

In this instance, the Federal capital in D.C. is making immigration policy for the several states, determining who should have the right to enter and immigrate to local communities. I think this would be a violation of the tenth amendment. No where in the Constitution does it give the congress power to open borders of the several states, or restrict immigration.

The constitution itself opens the borders of the states, and grants to Congress the authority to set rules for opening the borders of the federal nation-state. Please use more education next time.

I can see you do well regurgitating your statist history. Very fine job. I'll not disagree with your POV. It basically restated, in another way, what I just said. What you were doing was dealing with empirical issues, not the philosophy behind them though.

I was talking about the political philosophy subtext.

http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hobbes/Leviathan.pdf

What is the argument of ch. 18?

Chapter 18 is devoted to showing that there is a kind of contradiction between two things:

1. wanting to have a stable, peaceful society governed by an effective sovereign.
2. contradicting anything listed in chapter 18, that is, either denying the sovereign any of the rights listed there (especially the three listed in the next section) or giving subjects rights not listed there.

In Hobbes’s opinion, that was exactly the combination of attitudes held by a crucial part of the governing classes in England that led to the Civil War. For instance, some of them thought they could have the state while limiting its powers to raise taxes: they reserved that power for Parliament, where they were pre-eminent.


Who or what is the sovereign?

There are two ways of identifying the sovereign. The sovereign in a society is a person or body of persons who:

1. has been given the right of governing through the social contract. (Lev. ch. 17, par. 13).
2. has the three “marks” of sovereignty, namely, control of the military, ability to raise money, and control of religious doctrines. (Lev. ch. 18, par. 16).

Obviously, these can come apart. Someone who hasn’t been given the right of governing in the social contract may seize the three essential rights of sovereignty. In fact, that is exactly what happened in the civil war, according to Hobbes. If you read his history of the war, Behemoth you’ll see a distinction between the de facto sovereign and the de jure sovereign which correspond to the first and second ways of identifying the sovereign. When King Charles I was captured, he remained the de jure sovereignty while the army was the de facto sovereign.
Hobbes on sovereignty

Actually, what I'm mainly doing is trying to throw Bripat a bone, so that he can be right for once in his life. He claims I work hard at being a douche bag. But to be honest, I'm not sure my hard work is producing any rewards here. I'm pretty sure I can be just as much of a douche bag without actually trying.

Anyway, to address your actual point, I disagree that I haven't addressed the philosophy behind it. I simply find your interpretation thereof to be without merit.

The concept of sovereignty has never been attributed to individuals of the general population. The very conception of sovereignty relies upon the existence of some kind of government. Sovereignty can be described in a nutshell to be the ability or right of an entity to rule itself without interference from outside forces. This can be further qualified to say that sovereignty exists where an entity rules itself with only such "interference" or limitations by which it has itself has so chosen to be bound, or where such limitations are relatively minor. The "marks" of sovereignty are nothing more than those things by which sovereignty is demonstrated.

The resting place of sovereignty was never a matter of dispute in regards to the Revolutionary War, and only through the most elaborate of intellectual exercises could it have ever been said that an appraisal of such a question had born any significance to the political events of the time. The Revolutionary War was a dispute about the quality of his rule. And the number one complaint was that a foreign Parliament had power to tax His Majesty's subjects without affording them representation in the same.

Never did the founding fathers believe that every individual was sovereign in and of himself. Hell, many of these same founding fathers were themselves slave owners. What they believed was merely that sovereignty could not be preserved in any government when the consent of the governed was retired. The founders did not try to establish each person as an individual sovereign, free from all government. To the contrary, they established for themselves a separate government in which American sovereignty would thenceforth rest.