Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church

by William T. Cavanaugh

The conceptual leap that accompanies the advent of the state in the sixteenth century is the invention of sovereignty, a doctrine that asserts the incontestable right of the central power to make and enforce law for those people who fall within recognized territorial borders. Giddens contrasts borders with traditional frontiers, peripheral and poorly marked or poorly guarded regions in which the power of the center is diffuse. In premodern Europe, authority was often marked by personal loyalties owed in complexly layered communal contexts. In the state, by contrast, borders mark out a unitary space in which the individual is subject directly to the center, which has the right to enforce its will through a monopoly on the means of legitimate violence within those borders.31