Study on Sovereignty

Maistre's central claim is that sovereignty is not a product of the people's will, deliberation, or consent. It is a divinely bestowed authority fitted to man's needs rather than his wishes. He rejects the social contract tradition and Rousseau's account of popular sovereignty outright: society, he argues, is the product of men's instinctive makeup, not conscious decision. Since government is natural to human life, it cannot legitimately be denied, revoked, or disobeyed by the people. The work is a foundational statement of counter-revolutionary political theology.

Maistre's treatment of democracy is strikingly modern in its diagnosis, though his conclusions are opposite to Tocqueville's. He argues democracy has very few restraints and is consequently oppressive; it is unstable because aristocrats rule in fact while the people rule in name. Democracies, he writes, often do wild and foolhardy things, and the equalitarian spirit can summon the people to surrender everything to the state. These factors make democracy brilliant but only transitory. The analysis anticipates Tocqueville's concerns about democratic despotism, though Maistre deploys it to defend monarchy rather than to reconcile democracy with liberty.

Study on Sovereignty originated as extensive commentary on Rousseau's thought, and it constitutes a sustained critique of the Genevan philosopher's political theory. Maistre attacks the idea that legitimate political authority can derive from the general will or from any form of popular deliberation. He argues that the very concept of a 'people' is meaningless without a sovereign: the word people is relative and has no meaning divorced from the idea of sovereignty, since the idea of a people involves aggregation around a common center. Without sovereignty, there can be no political unity or cohesion.

Despite his reputation as an absolutist, Maistre argues that no single form of government is universally best. The absolute question 'What is the best form of government?' is, he writes, as insoluble as it is indefinite; it has as many correct solutions as there are possible combinations in the relative positions of nations. The best government for each nation is the one capable of producing the greatest possible sum of happiness and strength for the greatest number during the longest time. This pragmatic strain coexists uneasily with his preference for monarchy, which he considers the form proper for practically every nation.

Sovereignty, for Maistre, is an expression of divine governance rather than human invention. The same power that decreed social order and sovereignty also decreed different modifications of sovereignty according to the different character of nations. Nations are born and die like individuals; they have a general soul and a true moral unity, evidenced above all by language. The Creator has traced on the globe the limits of nations. This providential framework means that political arrangements are not subject to human redesign: they are fitted to the needs of particular peoples by a wisdom beyond human deliberation.

The title reflects Maistre's focus on the nature and origin of sovereign authority, rather than on particular constitutional arrangements or policy questions. It was written around 1794–1798 during Maistre's exile from revolutionary France and is often grouped with his major political works, including Considerations on France and the Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions. While less celebrated than Considerations, Study on Sovereignty provides the conceptual foundation for Maistre's political theology, developing in detail the account of sovereignty that his more famous works presuppose.