Review of Sovereignty, RIP by Don Herzog

*Sovereignty, RIP* by Don Herzog (2020). Published by Yale University Press.

At the time of writing this originally, I am a third semester graduate student hurtling towards the end of my degree. Granted, it’s been a wild ride doing an interdisciplinary master’s degree across the humanities, and I have no idea about what I’m going to be doing once I graduate from my school, but I’m glad I did it for sure. This semester one of the classes I’ve been taking is about nationalism and sovereignty, and while the professor is approaching it from a Western and American angle, I’ve found a lot of what we’ve been discussing to be interesting in terms of my own research when it comes to Asia (although I would like more Asian-based theorists in the long run).

Anyways, one of the books we were assigned to read throughout the course was Sovereignty, RIP. We were given this book towards the end of the semester, after we had gone through all of the nationalist theorists and history, and we officially progressed into the sovereignty part of the class with this book. I will say, this was a fun read overall compared to some of the more dense texts we had read earlier in the semester.

Let’s get into the review.

An argument as to why sovereignty is an outdated concept and term to apply to scholarship.

One of the most interesting parts of this book is really about how it opens: Herzog deliberately chooses to give us some of the gory details of what it means to live under a sovereign in the Medieval period, and how peasants and everyday people were tortured and regularly killed under these people’s rules. Our professor had to give an explicit content warning to us when it came to the opening of the book. I thought it wasn’t as bad as he made it seems, as someone who’s studied genocide in graphic detail before, but other of my classmates thought that it was difficult to get through.

Once you get through that portion of the text, Herzog manages to get down to the nitty gritty details on why he thinks that sovereignty is such an outdated concept. Some of the core arguments that Herzog has includes pulling out case studies throughout history in order to show that the concept of sovereignty—which basically says that one has an unchallenged ruler presiding through all of the realm—has been limited by the governments and states put into place.

The United State sis one of the textbook examples returned to throughout the text. Herzog brings up the revolutionary concepts that the Founding Fathers were grappling with when it came to forming the American government, and then references court cases such as Georgia v. Cherokee Nation to show how American ideals were shifting in a period of rapid colonial expansion into the West, and eventually into islands and abroad.

Essentially, at the core of each of these examples is how sovereignty was outlined in the beginning, but then throughout these country’s histories they shifted more towards governmental approach and then lost the definition of what it means to truly be a sovereign nation.

This is a good book to read in tandem with other political science and interdisciplinary books on the subject, as if I weren’t taking a nationalism and sovereignty course, then I wouldn’t be able to fully grasp the implications of Herzog’s arguments. For example, these kinds of books can be a little dense if you’re not used to academic texts that merge politics with more complex parts of history.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, I thought this was an interesting book to read. The previous week we had read a book on why we needed sovereignty, so to flip to this book was fascinating to see both sides of the arguments. I think that Herzog has some solid points throughout, and while I don’t agree with all of them fully, I still think that there was immense value in this book in providing a perspective I didn’t know much about beforehand.

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