Despite his commitment to absolutism, Bodin had moderate views on how the government should be conducted in practice. He considered that, although the sovereign is not obliged to do so, he is advised to convene as a practical means a senate from which he can seek advice, to give judges some power for the practical administration of the law and to use successions as a means of communication with the people. [Citation needed] Bodin believed that “the most divine, excellent, and royally appropriate form of government is governed in part aristocratic and partly democratic.” [14] Two of the most important attacks by political philosophers on sovereignty since World War II came in the 1950s from Bertrand de Jouvenel and Jacques Maritain. In his 1957 book, Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into the Political Good, Jouvenel recognized that sovereignty is an important attribute of the modern political authority needed to suppress disputes within the state and find cooperation in defense against foreigners. But he categorically condemns the modern concept of sovereignty, which creates power above the rules, a power whose decrees are legitimate simply because they emanate from its will. For Jouvenel, sovereignty reached its peak at Hobbes, in the “terrible conception of which everything goes back to coercive means that allow the sovereign to promulgate rights and dictate laws in every possible way. But these means of coercion are themselves only a fraction of the social forces concentrated in the hands of the sovereign” (197). Despite their differences over the place and form of sovereignty, later thinkers such as Locke, Pufendorf, and Rousseau must have “felt the allure of this mechanically perfect construction” (198). It was “the hour of sovereignty in itself,” writes Jouvenel, whose existence “henceforth almost no one would have the harshness to deny it” (198). While the sovereign state gradually occupied the European continent in the early modern period and eventually formed the system that occupied the globe, contemporary political philosophers adopted this form of politics and described what made it legitimate. They were not at the origin of the concept, because already in the Middle Ages, philosophers such as Dante and Marsilius of Padua advocated a separation of temporal and religious forces, which had to be achieved by transferring privileges into the hands of the temporal ruler. Then, in the early modern period, there were two pretty much contemporary philosophers who did not write explicitly or consciously about sovereignty, but whose ideas were important developments in the term. Observing the politics of city-states in his Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli described what a prince had to do to promote a prosperous republic in terms that gave him supreme authority over his territory.
Clearly, he could not be bound by natural law, canon law, the commandments of the gospel, or any of the norms or authorities that engaged the members of Christendom. On the contrary, he should be ready to “not be good” and ready to do evil, not because evil was no longer bad, but because it was sometimes necessary to promote a central goal to Machiavelli, an end that boils down to the unifying idea of his thought: the strength and order of the state. The prince`s obligation was the raison d`être. He was the supreme on the territory of the state and responsible for the well-being of this unique and unified body. (1) Sovereignty and international law: independence and equality. In the general context of self-determination, the place of sovereignty in international law needs a declaration, as self-determination is generally (albeit wrongly) seen as a quest for sovereignty and independence. Sovereignty as a principle of international law must be clearly distinguished from sovereignty in its internal and constitutional aspects. It is implicit in the nature of sovereignty as a supreme authority that such a notion of sovereignty does not apply to the role of sovereign States at the international level and within the framework of international law. Internationally, no state has the highest legal power and authority over other states in general, and states in general are not subordinate to the legal power and authority of other states (although in ancient times such claims were sometimes made, especially in china`s traditional view of international relations, which was maintained for more than a millennium, that the legitimate relationship of all foreigners to the imperial court was a respectful subordination – a view that led to great differences on the occasion of the visit of a British diplomatic and commercial mission to the Chinese Emperor Qianlong in 1793). Furthermore, the sovereignty of States at the international level would be contrary to the conception of international law as a rule of conduct binding on States, regardless of their domestic law, since it implies their submission to international law and to all claims of a State at the international level to the absolute sovereignty and legality of its conduct, which are indisputable, unsustainable.
Nor should sovereignty be confused with international personality. The first is based on the notions of supreme authority and independence. International personality means the possession of rights, duties, powers and capacities under international law: any person or entity that has rights, duties, powers and abilities in international law has an international personality, even if that person or entity has no sovereignty. Sovereign States typically possess the full range of international legal rights, duties, powers and capacities and undoubtedly possess an international personality. But many States that are in one way or another subject to the authority of another State and are therefore not completely sovereign can still enjoy international personality by holding at least some of the legal rights conferred by international law (albeit on a less complete basis than sovereign States); The same applies to non-governmental entities, as well as to many international organizations. Sovereignty as a supreme authority necessarily implies independence. “Every nation which governs itself, in whatever form, without dependence on any foreigner, is a sovereign State” (Vattel, Le droit des gens (1773 ed.), Bk. 1, chap. 1, p.4). A sovereign ruler or state is strictly independent of any other temporal legal power within its limits in terms of legal powers and is also independent in terms of legal authority to act beyond its borders. The internal legal authority of a sovereign to act both internally and externally does not depend on any other earthly authority. In modern times, independence (despite the difficulties of implementation that may arise in practice) is considered the essential characteristic of “sovereign” States and, at the international level, as identical to sovereignty and as the defining characteristic of the State.
Independence was described in 1931 by Judge Anzilotti in classical terms[1] as after the Thirty Years` War, a European religious conflict that affected much of the continent, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 established the concept of territorial sovereignty as a norm of non-interference in the affairs of other states, the so-called Westphalian sovereignty. although the treaty itself reaffirmed the multiple levels of sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire.