Sovereignty and Constitutional Democracy: An inquiry into the Contribution of the Spanish Scholastics and their 17th Century Successors.

Most theories of constitutional democracy up to the present day are conceived for a territorially confined area that is traditionally labelled the (nation-)state. However, when thinking through its basic principles and pushing them into the international realm, two main challenges come to light. Since all human beings should be given equal moral consideration it is hard to justify existing boundaries. On which grounds should liberal-democratic values only be valid within an arbitrarily constructed territory? Next to this territoriality challenge, there is a sovereignty challenge. If, traditionally, the (nation-)state was considered to be the first and sole place of sovereignty, this view has now come under pressure, since it is not clear why only the nation-state should have sovereignty over its subjects. This research project focuses primarily on the second challenge, by turning to the past and studying how the fellows of the School of Salamanca (16th century) and their immediate successors thought about sovereignty. The choice for this more or less homogeneous corpus of texts is motivated by two reasons. First, it was precisely in this literature that the conception of sovereignty was given political and legal content and interpreted from an international point of view. Second, these texts have been conspicuously absent in research on modern notions of sovereignty. As such, a close study of these texts may offer valuable elements to revitalise present-day discussions.