Sovereignty and the Private-Public Distinction: A Critical Genealogy

• In Event: Feminism and Politics

Abstract

Theorists have described sovereignty as a “threshold” concept, operative in and productive of the limits of the legal order. But to what extent does the literal threshold—the boundary of the home—determine and reflect the workings of sovereign power? This paper argues that past accounts have assumed but not theorized the position of the family and private home in the constitution and limits of sovereign power. Here, I draw on feminist accounts of privacy and state power to argue that the distinction of the household—and, as I trace, attached forms of privacy, both individual and familial—from the political is, far from sovereignty’s natural predecessor, instead the definitional act of sovereignty itself. I therefore make two interventions, one theoretical and one historical.

First, I argue here any definition of sovereignty that emphasizes its Schmittian decisional aspect must necessarily rest on a prior, but far less theorized, power to delimit—what I suggest to be the capacity to declare the boundaries of the political as such. Although attentive to certain boundaries, the literature on sovereignty has missed how this power rests fundamentally on the particular capacity to draw and enforce the boundary between privacy and publicity. It misses, too, how political and legal negotiation and renegotiation over internal boundaries, particularly around the privacy of the home, are as much of a feature and defense of sovereign power as any wall or border.

Second, I argue that this foundational distinction between private and public opens a new genealogy of the concept of sovereignty, one that exposes concealed continuities between sovereignty’s historical forms and its predecessors. To the extent that sovereign power emerges in this originary distinction of the political from the non- or anti-political, we can trace sovereignty’s roots far earlier than the particular corporatist, absolutist strain championed by Bodin and Hobbes. How might this invite reconsiderations of the intellectual trajectory of the concept of the “autonomy of the political," generally attributed to theorists like Schmitt, Arendt, and Weber?

This paper argues that sovereign power affirms and polices the boundaries of “the political” not only in creating national borders, as understood in the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction, but through the creation and, as I show, the disavowal of privacy and the family. On these grounds, this paper traces a critical and legal genealogy of the role of privacy as sovereign power's unarticulated, and under-theorized, constitutive outside. To what extent might we reimagine the history of the concept of sovereignty if we center its foundations in the distinction between the household and the political?

Author

• Helen Galvin Ross, University of Chicago