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Power in sovereignty and its self-legitimation: on the autopoietic semantics and contingency of popular sovereignty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2015

Jiří Přibáň
Jiří Přibáň*
Affiliation:
Cardiff Law School, Cardiff University. Email: Priban@cf.ac.uk
*
Priban@cf.ac.uk
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Abstract

This paper analyses sovereignty as part of multiple power operations and the self-referential semantics of positive law and politics regarding the concept of popular sovereignty. The interplay between power structures and the self-description of society as democratic polity with popular sovereignty reflects on the typically modern tension between democracy as a contingent form of government and democracy as an imagined stable form of social totality. Using autopoietic social systems theory, the author reformulates the concept of sovereignty as the specific semantics internally constructed by the functionally differentiated systems of politics and law beyond the image of Leviathan and its socially integrating force, and independently of state organisation and its limitations.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 11 , Issue 4: Critical Socio-legal Engagements with Systems Thinking , December 2015 , pp. 481 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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