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Modern liberal states are founded on individual rights and popular sovereignty. These doctrines are conceptually and historically intertwined but are in theoretical and practical tension. Locke's political theory is a source for proponents of both doctrines, and the same tension that runs through modern liberal thought and practice can be found in his theory. Rather than define the state in terms of a single sovereign authority, Locke constructs a sovereignless commonwealth with several coexisting claimants to supreme authority. He rejects sovereignty as what unifies the state, and he wants to replace the discourse of sovereignty theory with a language of obligation that will help bind together the sovereignless state. This language permits its adherents to articulate the reasonable basis and limits of political power. An understanding of Locke's sovereignless state helps us better comprehend the tensions embodied in discourses about individual natural rights, popular sovereignty, and governmental authority heard in the liberal state. (American Political Science Review / FUB)

Since Rousseau, and perhaps because of him, political theory has often been characterized by a disjunction between considerations of human nature and questions of justice and law. Yet, reexamining theSecond Discourseas a theodicy forces us to rethink how the essential questions of political theory are related just where they seem to become separated. The core of the theodicy is Rousseau's view that we are, by nature, physical beings embedded unproblematically in nature—good, or ordered, beings in a good, or ordered, whole. Although Rousseau presents his explicitly political thought as a juridical doctrine seemingly separated from his understanding of human nature and history, his political thought is founded upon his portrait of man's existence in the "pure state of nature." This portrait serves as a positive formal model to enable us to remake our corrupted existence through the legitimate state—itself modeled by Rousseau on the divine or natural whole.