UDC

Authors

Abstract

This article analyses the concept of new sovereignty, popular in the past decade, and the presence of this conceptual construct in M. Hardt and A. Negri’s Empire in particular. In 2000, the sensational work of the Western Marxists identified several problems of contemporary social and political science: biopower, debate on sovereignty, and administrative control over society. Over the past decade and a half, there has accumulated a significant body of material investigating this issue. The author of this article analyses the work by M. Hardt and A. Negri in the context of political regimes and validity of the terminology. The main focus is, however, on the sovereignty debate as the central one for the political science in recent years. The popular concept of new sovereignty received a mixed response in the academic community. In this paper, it is considered in terms of its applicability in politics and in the institutional development of political systems. The article analyses the modern understanding of “new” and “limited” sovereignty as compared to the classical concept of sovereignty in the history of political doctrines. The author also examines the trends in sovereignty transformation of nation-states in the modern post-bipolar society. A review of Empire’s content showed that it is not in direct relation to its name: as a rule, serious studies on empires treat empire as a scope of functions and features somewhat different from M. Hardt and A. Negri’s understanding. The author concludes by saying that, although the monograph analyses the concept of sovereignty, it does not pay enough attention to the ontology of imperial political systems.

Keywords

References

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