Jens Bartelson provides a critical analysis and conceptual history of sovereignty, dealing with philosophical and political texts during three periods.

Preface; 1. Introduction: sovereignty and fire; 2. The problem: deconstructing sovereignty; 3. Beyond subject and structure: towards a genealogy of sovereignty; 4. Inventing outsides: proto-sovereignty, exempla and the general theory of the state in the Renaissance; 5. How policy became foreign: sovereignty, mathesis and interest in the Classical Age; 6. Reorganizing reality: sovereignty, Modernity and the international; 7. Conclusion: the end of sovereignty?