Political Power, Ideology and Society #1

When debating different forms of political power, we have the tendency to immediately assume that the State should be separated from the rest of them. This assumption could be argued to be well placed, if we were to separate different forms of political power according to the sovereignty problem.

The sovereignty problem is basically the question of where the political power claims its right to rule. Before the modern State that has its roots back in the fifteenth century, this problem was overcome with the notion of divinity: the political power (the ruler or the ruling class etc.) would claim that it is God(s) incarnate, or the son of God(s), or the messenger of God(s) or yet (s)he who speaks the Law of God(s). This would basically mean that the political power claims that the right to rule over the people belongs to some sort of divinity, and the political power represents that divinity whereas the modern State overcomes this problem with an idea that is much more appealing to our minds today: the society. The modern State claims that the people have the right to determine their own Law and that the political power represents the society.

In short, the difference between other forms of political power and the State is the mere difference of where the political power claims its right to rule from. This shift in the source of sovereignty, combined with the humanist thought that places man as a centre for all values brings forth one of the more basic problems with modern societies: what is the difference between the individual that placed his/her faith in religion and obeyed the so called Law of God(s) that was enforced by the political power and the individual that placed his/her faith in humanity and the people and obeyed the so called Law of the people that’s being enforced by today’s political powers?