Feisal G. Mohamed's Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary steps away from discussions among early modernists about parliamentarism and republicanism to focus instead on the functional locus of political power: sovereignty. Interweaving legal history, political philosophy, and literature, Mohamed examines how legitimate political authority was understood in seventeenth-century England. Here Mohamed is wide-ranging in his analysis; familiar faces, like Thomas Hobbes and John Milton, feature alongside less well-known figures, like Lord Saye and Sele, William Fiennes, and Sir Henry Vane. In striking up conversation among such varied political writers and actors, Mohamed's aim is to “theorize sovereignty beyond the ambit of political philosophy” and to illustrate how sovereignty was conceived in the period's broader imaginary (4). To accomplish this, he employs a two-pronged schematic. First, Mohamed suggests, sovereignty was viewed as taking one of three forms: unitary; divided and balanced; or universalist. Second, each form could be one of two colors: “black,” when sovereignty was seen as a means to restore what social change had regrettably disrupted, or “red,” when sovereign power was viewed as “riding a cresting tide of societal change . . . and revitalizing political life” (4). Finally, Mohamed argues, classifying early modern thinkers according to this rubric reframes our understanding of one of the twentieth century's most important theorists of sovereignty: Carl Schmitt.

The book is at its best where Mohamed homes in on the political significance of various literary forms. Its second chapter, for example, offers an engaging and persuasive account of the ways in which romance literature became a vehicle of nostalgia for the English nobility amid their political displacement in the mid-seventeenth century.

Yet the larger framework within which analyses like this are situated can at times be something of a head scratcher. Noting that sovereignty has often had an “embarrassed place in modern political philosophy” (193), Mohamed frames his intervention as a “corrective” counterweight to a hyper-fixation on republicanism which, he argues, has resulted in the “neglect[ ]” of other important political concepts (14). It is unclear, however, how this is the case, or why, to talk about republicanism in the seventeenth century, is precisely not to talk about sovereignty. For the sake of argument, let us accept the doubtful proposition that sovereignty has in fact been squeezed out of the picture. What is then gained by bringing it back into frame? Mohamed's answer to this question is a perplexing one. By recentering our focus on sovereignty in seventeenth-century England, Mohamed suggests, we can understand Schmitt differently. Surely, though, if our disregard for sovereignty has been so egregious, this cannot be the only or even primary upshot of mending our ways.

Moreover, the exact manner in which our understanding of Schmitt shifts—as a result of this refocused attention on sovereignty—is difficult to fully pin down. Frequently it seems that the point is that the period is full of proto- or quasi-proto-Schmittians. Milton, for one, meets this mark. Milton and Schmitt share an interest in seeing sovereignty “reflect the will of the people as a political unity” (135). Although Milton's commitment to unitary sovereignty takes a “red” hue in contrast to Schmitt's “black,” this shared interest transcends their otherwise markedly different political contexts. That there is some commonality here may be all well and good, but why is early modern England the place to go to look for proto-Schmittian theorists of sovereignty and why is sussing them out an important task?

The proto-Schmittian that Mohamed is most interested in is Hobbes. Looking up to Hobbes, Schmitt nevertheless rejected and was disillusioned by his allowance for freedom of conscience, which paved the way for liberalism. However, Mohamed argues, the intellectual and even biographical affinities between these two thinkers are far greater than Schmitt himself appreciated. Defending “black” unitary conceptions of sovereign power, both were essentially turned on by the regimes they intended their theories of sovereignty to defend. Both, Mohamed argues, were also motivated to adopt this shared view of sovereign power by a deep concern that “increasingly depersonalized notions of political authority had taken root in ways that threatened political stability” (54). For Schmitt and Hobbes alike, he claims, the “thickening” of ties within institutions and associations outside the purview of sovereign authority came at the dangerous expense of a “thinning sense of obligation to the political community as a whole and to the sovereign power at its head” (55).

Yet in drawing such a parallel, Sovereignty puts forth a nearly unrecognizable portrait of Hobbes who comes to look, on its pages, like a community-driven reactionary loath to leave feudalism behind. To develop this reading, Mohamed argues that Hobbes's claim to offer a radical new science of politics is a phony, purely rhetorical move. Neither Hobbes's nuova scienza nor his “departures therefrom” is genuine (54). Instead “both are rhetorical postures” (54) through which Hobbes advanced “polemics under cover of methodological improvement” (28). “If we accept this view,” Mohamed writes, “it shifts significantly the role that Schmitt and Strauss have assigned to Hobbes in the story of modern political philosophy” (54).

This is a big “if” premised on a false binary between scientific practice and rhetorical persuasion. Vast tracts of Hobbes's work, and his own understanding of science (perhaps best analyzed in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's, Leviathan and the Air-Pump [1985]), have to be thrown out or ignored for the scientific aspect of his political philosophy to amount to nothing more than mere window dressing. Furthermore, capitalizing on the rhetorical cache afforded to science is in no way automatically indicative of inauthenticity. Hobbes may well have enjoyed a rhetorical boost by presenting his political theory as political science and at the same time have taken his efforts to be genuinely scientific and revolutionary.