The State in Retrospect

Abstract

One of the more revealing statements in the history of political consciousness, made by the emerging territorial monarchs toward the end of the thirteenth century, is “the king is emperor in his own kingdom.” This was a claim that attempted to legitimate the new form of rulership by appeal to an incipient concept of sovereignty inherent in the existing model of supreme authority within Christendom, a concept that reached back to the ancient Roman imperium itself. As a political stratagem, it worked well enough. As an accurate reflection of political reality, it was woefully inadequate. Although the king was now clearly something more than a feudal noble first among equals, he was hardly an emperor. And even if he could have claimed authority equivalent to the emperor’s, it was of a nature not only entirely different, but also destructive ultimately of the pretensions of the emperor to universal rule within the ancient Christian Republic. It was, in fact, the first stirrings of a concept of state sovereignty.