“Sovereignty” is not a topic or term that Rawls spends significant time on. (It barely appears in his extensive indexes.) But it, along with the closely related ideas of a sovereign and sovereign powers, are important for understanding several aspects of his work. Part of The Law of Peoples, the stability of justice as fairness, and Rawls’s connection to others in the social contract tradition, are intimately related to his views on sovereignty and sovereign power. While these topics seem disparate, they have a close connection through the idea of sovereignty. Seeing this helps show the over-all unity of Rawls’s thought.

The modern notion of sovereignty and of sovereign powers developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the works of such thinkers as Jean Bodin in Les six livres de la république (the most relevant sections reprinted as On Sovereignty (1992 [1576])), Hugo Grotius in The Rights of War and Peace (2005 [1625]), and Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1994 [1651]) and other writings. These works were developed against the background of the wars of religion in Europe and the concurrent emergence of the modern state. The theories of sovereignty that developed provide answers to two problems that remain central to Rawls’s works: how to secure the stability of a political order so that members of the society may lourish, and the proper relationship between distinct societies. The first of these questions has been central to Rawls since TJ, where Rawls provides an answer via the “congruence” argument. A new answer to this question is given in PL. Though rarely noted, Rawls’s position is intimately tied to a theory of sovereignty, in that part of his goal is to show how the problem of stability may be solved without either a uniied, unlimited sovereign or a slide into anarchist or minimal state views.