ANU Philosophy's Professor Philip Pettit had the honour of being speaker for the 50th annual Cecil A. Wright Memorial Lecture on October 10 2019, at the University of Toronto. Philip's talk was on 'the Elusive Sovereign'.

Abstract: Does a conception of the law like H.L.A.Hart’s allow us to postulate a sovereign in the legal regime? Is it consistent with thinking that there is one supreme authority over the law? Or does his decentered model of the polity make no room for the idea of sovereignty? Does that model rule out the possibility of a legal sovereign in the way in which the early theorists of sovereignty such as Bodin and Hobbes thought that the mixed-constitutional model of the state ruled it out? Surprisingly, it turns out that despite the arguments of those theorists, and despite Hart’s own misgivings, the idea of sovereignty can find a natural home within a mixed or decentered set of legal arrangements.

Watch Prof. Pettit's lecture below.