In this book, Dimitri Vadoulakis has made a significant attempt at rethinking the relationship between sovereignty and democracy. More concretely, Vadoulakis is concerned with teasing out the aporias and inconsistencies between democracy and sovereignty so as to be able to resurrect an agonistic conception of the former without falling into the traps or obfuscations imposed by conceptions of the latter. To many political scientists, however, this differentiation between sovereignty and its democratic “other” may appear difficult if not problematic to envisage. This difficulty is conceivably the product of a lengthy history of Western political thought that constrains us to think about politics more generally and freedom (as Hannah Arendt argued in The Human Condition [1998]) necessarily in conjunction with sovereignty.

The naturalization of the conjunction between democracy and sovereignty is predicated on a specific “relational ontology of power” (p. 1). Vadoulakis understands this ontology as being characterized by a means versus ends logic. Key here has been the consistent attempt at theorizing sovereignty as the legitimation or justification of violence within particular frameworks of laws, principles, or customs for general ends. However, what he argues is that democracy is, rather, a distinct relational ontology of power that cannot be reducible to such a logic of means and ends as can sovereignty. The substance of Vadoulakis’s work is then to demonstrate, on the one hand, the conceptual tensions involved with the theorization of sovereignty and democracy, and yet their inevitable conjunction, and on the other, to validate the importance of judgment as a way of mitigating the imperatives of sovereign violence that flow from such justifications of sovereignty.

One of the great merits of Sovereignty and Its Other is that it compellingly integrates the various theoretical debates about sovereignty as a justification for violence into a historical typology (ancient, modern, and contemporary) that gives the reader a sense of how such debates can be understood around common questions and responses. While the notion of sovereignty may be formulated in various ways, from Carl Schmitt’s notion of exceptional decisionism to Michel Foucault’s emphasis on governmentality or biopower and the control of populations, for Vadoulakis what connects various theorizations of sovereignty are a set of certain assumptions and discourses about how they relate ends and means. By this he avers that various historical epochs conceptualized sovereign violence in terms of means and ends in different ways, but always in such a manner as to reflect a form of rhetorical justification.

For the ancients, best embodied in Augustine’s The City of God, the justification of violence against pagans is centered on the ultimate goal of entering the “city of God.” By contrast, modern notions of sovereignty argue for the reverse emphasis on the means. While “ancient sovereignty is produced by the power of the transcendent end . . . the modern sovereign produces his own power by creating the conditions to perpetuate his power” (p. 77). Modern justifications of sovereignty are thus rooted in a circular “power for the sake of power” such that all of the “laws and institutions” are constituted on the basis of the indefinite endurance of the state. Finally, in our contemporary biopolitical setting (initially theorized by Foucault), the justifiability of violence and the institutions designed to ensure the longevity of the state is no longer central. Rather, what characterizes this biopolitical time is “a dispensed sovereign power that blurs the distinction between means and ends” (p. 5). The emphasis on the health of a population and the governmental techniques designed to perpetuate this end can, as Foucault has shown in ‘Society Must Be Defended’ (2003), easily become a suicidal form of racial violence (i.e., Nazi Germany). What connects these seemingly distinct types of sovereign relations or justifications for violence is precisely the ability to draw a type of Schmittian distinction between friend and enemy: to naturalize a bifurcation between self and other that facilitates the use of violence.

Vadoulakis’s turn toward agonistic democracy, by contrast, is then an attempt at arresting this justification of sovereign violence. Justification is contrasted with judgment. Judgment here is defined as that which “sever[s] or interrupt[s] … the immediate connection between law and justice” (p. 13). Whereas, following Walter Benjamin, law and justice are themselves conjoined through a means/ends justification, to judge then essentially reveals the contingency and particularity of the various means and ends relations. Judgment thus acts as a form of “dejustification” (p. 10). Democratic judgment is precisely, then, this cultivation of openness to the embodied “other,” but in ways that are rhetorically contentions or agonistic by a pluralistic set of voices. Democracy is thus never reducible to a particular relation between law and justice, nor is it even separable from the potential for violence to emerge. It is, for Vadoulakis, “a process of transformation” that allows participants to realize that the “completeness of sovereignty is an illusion” (p. 202). An openness to democracy and judgment is an openness to the contingency and unpredictability of life.

Vadoulakis’s work is also noteworthy for two reasons. First, the text is replete with engaging discussions taken from the literature of the particular epoch in order to illustrate his arguments. From Sophocles and Shakespeare to Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (2004)., Vadoulakis is able to demonstrate the important nuances of his arguments in novel ways. Second, more generally, is the significance placed on the role of violence in political theory that all too often gets obfuscated in much of the contemporary literature. The discussion in Chapter 2 on Thucydides and the logic of state sovereignty is one which international relations theorists would find useful.

One curiosity of Vadoulakis’s text, however, is the lack of sustained engagement with Arendt’s own notion of judgment. Arendt inchoately theorized a nonsovereign capacity to judge from the perspective of the spectator as a type of reconciliation with a tragic past versus a specific faculty of judgment of the actor for use in the public realm. This form of aesthetic judgment (following Kant’s Third Critique) evokes shared meaning, imagination, and a capacity to relate to each other. Judgment, Arendt further realized, was a key means for an active life that could not be constrained by the conceit of sovereign notions of truth or validity. An Arendtian theory of judgment might thus fit with Vadoulakis’s emphasis on the rhetorical dejustification of sovereignty. Nonetheless, he has written a particularly interesting work that advances key insights into the concepts of sovereignty, judgment, and violence.