Sovereignty and Constitutional Power in late Plato and Guo Xiang

• In Event: Conceptualizing Sovereignty in Comparative Political Thought

Abstract

In a recent English rendering of the title of Zhuangzi’s seventh chapter of the inner chapter edited and annotated by Guo Xiang (265-312 AD), Richard John Lynn translates this much contested title, Ying Diwang (應帝王), as “Fit to be Sovereigns” (Lynn 2022, 166). For some, this would be a mistranslation. Afterall, it is accepted that the normative vocabulary of constitutional thinking and sovereignty is a quintessentially Western European invention first coherently articulated in the late sixteenth century by a French theorist, Jean Bodin. As a result, it seems inappropriate to use this language to interpret pre-modern, non-Western political phenomena concerning the question of political authority and rulership.
This paper argues that the concept of sovereign rule need not be restricted to an exclusively modern European context. It does so through two studies of sovereignty in pre-modern intellectual texts exemplified by the selected dialogues and chapters of Plato and Guo Xiang. In each of these cases, the core of sovereignty does not change vis-à-vis its modern counterparts: it is that authority which holds the highest political power to appoint offices, institute laws, and create the appropriate political space where rulers and the ruled coexist. Through a cross-dialogue philological analysis of Plato’s Minos and Book I of the Laws, this paper concludes that proper constitutional order is secured through the hierarchically articulated structure legitimated by the sovereign, administered by officeholders, and obeyed meekly by average citizens. In comparison, through a reconstruction of Guo Xiang’s commentary on Zhuangzi’s Ying Diwang, this paper demonstrates that good political order is achieved when the sovereign functions infrastructurally so as to create the condition under which political subjects can achieve their individual freedoms.

Author

• Aemann McCornack, Princeton University