Sovereignty Knowledge Law

<p><em>Sovereignty Knowledge Law</em> investigates the notion of sovereignty from three different but related perspectives: as a legal question in relation to the sovereign state as a political question in relation to sovereign power and as a metaphysical question in relation to sovereign self-knowledge. The varied and interchangeable uses of legal sovereignty political sovereignty and metaphysical sovereignty in contemporary debates have resulted in a situation where the word ‘sovereignty’ itself has become something of a non-concept. Panu Minkkinen shows here how these three perspectives have informed one another by addressing their shared relationship to law and to the ‘autocephalous’ function of sovereignty; that is the attempt to provide a single source and foundation for law power and self-knowledge. Through an effort to domesticate the intrinsically ‘heterocephalous’ nature of power the juridical and jurisprudential aim has been to confine power within the closed vertical hierarchy of traditional legal thinking. <em>Sovereignty Knowledge Law</em> thus elaborates this heterocephaly proposing new understandings of sovereignty as well as of law and of legal scholarship.</p>