The Fable of the World: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freedom in Our Times

`...Sovereignty is the process, characteristic of political modernity, which establishes freedom in the form of a particularism of a people, of a nation. The thesis of this fable is that this process has come to an end---that is, it has come to end only in Europe. In other words, the fable of sovereignty has come to an end in the place where it originated and was first put to work. If this claim is historically meaningful, it is important for political philosophy to take its measure, to rethink freedom in this period when sovereignty has reached its culmination.'

Modern political theory begins with the rise of the new state in the sixteenth century and both are mutually imbricated around the concept and practice of sovereignty. In the course of the next centuries, sovereignty is generalized as the form of the modern state: eventually, there is no state which is not sovereign, and there is no understanding of the state which does not depend upon the deployment of sovereignty. Yet, argues Gerard Mairet in this rigorous and timely book, just at this moment of the culmination of sovereignty, the limitations and dangers of this theory and practice have become apparent, as have the glimmers of a new form of political community beyond the sovereign state and its rootedness in inter-state violence. For Mairet, Europe, the begetter of the fable of the sovereign state as it consolidated its identity through territorial expansion, becomes the harbinger of a new federative form.

In this powerful genealogical investigation of the notion of sovereignty from Bodin and Hobbes, through Rousseau and the Federalists to Foucault and the framers of the European constitution, Mairet plots its articulation with and through the bloody history of Europe and colonialism, and shows how the reconstitution of the European political community after the Second World War marked the beginning of a new trajectory---a new narrative---that offers the hope of a post-sovereign, and postbellic, mode of political being-in-the-world.

Gerard Mairet is professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Paris VIII. His other publications include Le Maitre et la multitude, Le Principe de souverainete. Histoires et fondements du pouvoir moderne and Le Leviathan de Hobbes.
Philip Derbyshire is an academic, researcher and translator, and currently a British Academy post-doctoral research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. His previous translations include Childhood Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective and Transatlantic Translations: Dialogues in Latin American Literature.