As labor it makes little sense: wars generally extract costs far greater than their possible benefits. Wars can be fought over claims to quite unproductive territory; they are fought over conflicting ideas, beliefs, or historical claims.

Viewed from the perspective of the well-being of each individual, all would be better off if disputes were settled by arbitration or if those groups that hold different beliefs accepted a practice of political tolerance.

If the body’s well-being is the end of politics, then war makes no sense and criminal punishment should be replaced by rehabilitation and remediation.

Hobbes never offered an adequate explanation of that one power that characterizes the sovereign: the power to claim the life of the citizen. He could not do so because he thought the whole point of the labor of politics was to put off the moment of death, that is, to pursue the well-being of the body. If so, for politics to require the citizen’s death is a logical contradiction. Yet, this is exactly what we find.

Hobbes’s Leviathan may shift the field of killing from civil to international war—although often not even that shift occurs—but there is no reason to think that an international field of battle offers the Hobbesian individual a life any less nasty, brutish or short than that from which he fled in the state of nature. If sovereignty is a power over life and death, then, we cannot understand politics simply as the labor of fallen man.

The word “sovereignty” is irreducibly religious in origin and meaning. Over time, the locus of the sovereign subject changes, but not its transcendent character. The sovereignty of God becomes the sovereignty of kings, which becomes the sovereignty of nations, and ends with the sovereignty of man.

The claim of sovereignty expresses a sense of the deathless soul of man now made real in the fallen world. Absent sovereignty, man is doomed to labor and death. That labor, however, proves too much for man. He must believe and he finds in himself a capacity for faith.
In substantial part, it has been as a metaphysical promise that politics appeals to us. Every member of the body politic is an aspect of the sovereign’s body. As part of that mystical corpus, the subject participates in the sacred doubling that is man. He finds himself bound to labor, but he maintains a faith that he is a part of the deathless and omnipresent sovereign.

The royal “we” expressed the extended corpus of the sovereign, as well as the political identity of the subject. Still today, the citizen reads his own political order— historically and geographically—as the work of a plural subject. That subject is no longer the king, but the popular sovereign.

The citizen remains embedded in this “we,” when he reads the national history of sacrifice as his own. The Revolution is “our” struggle for freedom; the Constitution is the product of “We the People”; and the Civil War was the test of “our” commitment to the popular sovereign. The citizen knows where he stands in history because he views that history through the narrative of the popular sovereign.

The state’s history is our history; its territory is our space; and its future is ours as well. These are the elements of the counternarrative. There is no movement toward the universal, no sense of suffering as a cost, and no idea that the end of the nation is nothing more than individual well-being.

Modern states killed the king, but they certainly did not kill the sovereign. Instead, there has been a democratization of the king’s body. The mystical corpus of the state is now the popular sovereign, which maintains just that character of timelessness, omnipresence and omnipotence that characterized the king.

While the popular sovereign has no existence apart from the bodies of its members, those members do not constitute the sovereign in the aggregate. The sovereign is not the product of the social contract. Rather, the citizen is the product of the popular sovereign.

The sovereign always precedes and overflows the aggregate of individuals. The idea of sovereignty is that of an ultimate meaning that is never exhausted in any finite form—i.e., in the products of labor. The ultimate value of sovereignty is incalculable. Only so can it make a total claim on an individual’s life. There is no value of the profane against the sacred.

Once put at issue, the sacred quality of sovereignty will demand war without compromise, even if that means consumption of the entire polity. Thus, the continued existence of the United States is not one end among many for its citizens. For them, that existence gives meaning to history; it is not a part of a larger historical narrative, but the foundation of that history.

We do not measure the defense of sovereignty against citizen well-being. The sovereign has a nonnegotiable claim on all of the resources of the state, including the lives of its citizens. We are not yet done with a politics of manifest destiny, even if we mean to abandon efforts at neocolonialism.

The nuclearization of American politics perfectly expresses the ultimate value of that politics: better the destruction of the world than the failure of the United States. Nuclear policy also shows us that killing and being killed are reciprocal political phenomenon. We cannot threaten the enemy, without suffering the threat in return. We are relearning this lesson from the contemporary war on terrorism.

Citizens do not literally want to die for the state; although there have been moments of a romantic longing for such sacrifice. But a politics of sovereignty only exists as long as the imaginative possibility of self-sacrifice remains real for citizens. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “No society ever admitted that it could not sacrifice individual welfare to its own existence. If conscripts are necessary for its army, it seizes them, and marches them, with bayonets in their rear to death.”

A polity that has no power to call on its citizens for sacrifice lacks sovereignty. Indeed, it is hard even to call such an organization a state. Such a polity may understand itself as advancing individual well-being; it may see itself as an adjunct to markets. It is not its role, however, to take citizens beyond their individual interests.

An account of political life that ignores the metaphysics of sovereignty will never confront the actual experience of life and death within the state. It will reduce the political to law, law to reason, and reason to well-being. Sovereignty in this sense adds nothing to a politics of rights. The sovereign that moves citizens to acts of sacrifice, however, is not of this world at all. Sovereignty signifies the sacred foundation of the community.

The citizen understands that for sake of the sovereign he can be asked to suffer pain, and that under some circumstances the state can make an unanswerable demand upon his or her life—unanswerable because it is beyond the capacity of any proposition to comprehend. Argument ends, but the act remains. So it is with all faith in an ultimate meaning. Today, in the West, only politics can make that claim upon a life. As long as it can do so, we are in the presence of a sovereign power.

The willingness to sacrifice for the creation and maintenance of political meanings always appears inconceivable to those outside of the community. We find it incomprehensible that Palestinians would be willing to blow themselves up for the maintenance of a political identity. But the suicide bomber is not different in kind from the Israeli soldier.

Both know that political identity is a matter of life and death. Both sides in this conflict wonder at the capacity of the other to kill and be killed. Both sides try to apply a moral measure to the behavior of the other. In this, they each suffer from the same misunderstanding. Citizens sacrifice themselves and their children not because it is morally correct but because it is politically necessary. This a necessity, however, that can be measured only from within the political world of meaning.

We have the same reaction to the sacrificial politics of others as we do to those who believe in different gods, rituals, and sacred texts. It literally makes no sense to us; it appears “crazy.” How, we wonder, can anyone believe that the gods appeared in that object or that place?

Why would anyone think that wine can be the blood of Christ or that God would perform miracles for an enslaved people? This shock of difference, however, usually does not cause us to doubt our own beliefs. We think others strange, but that does not unmoor us from our own sacred rituals.

The same is true of our own political meanings. We cannot understand how anyone could believe in the sacred character of a king, but this does not lead us to question the way in which the sacred operates in our relationship to an atemporal, ubiquitous popular sovereign. It does not do so because we have little choice in the matter. There is not some other, non-symbolic world in which we can choose to live, once we learn that others live by meanings different from our own.

We cannot know in advance which meanings—political, moral, or familial—will dominate in any particular situation. However, even if political sacrifice has been resisted at particular moments or for particular causes, the idea of self-sacrifice has not been resisted in the modern nation-state. Citizens have lived with the knowledge that under some set of possible circumstances, the state could demand sacrifice and there would be no grounds of objection.