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Sovereignty in Post-Sovereign Society. A Systems Theory of European Constitutionalism. By Jin Pribán. London: Routledge, 2015. 262 pp. £34.99 paperback.
Authors who engage in theoretical puzzles are always welcomed by scientific communities. Authors who engage in solving puzzles by addressing compelling paradoxes of our daily life are even more welcome. This is the case of Jin Priban's book. Following upon a long-standing experience of research, in constitutionalism and systemic theories, Pribán 's work points directly to the heart of one of the modern trinity's pillars: sovereignty.
These are times of crisis for the traditional concept of sovereignty: sovereign States seem to prove, more than ever, the limits of their capacities to hold under stringent control the territories they were expected to govern and testify to the sunset of the golden age of national States as absolute protagonists of the international political stage. Whereas the common sense according to which sovereignty entered into a crisis is not in contention, much less has been done to understand how and to what extent concepts that we still adopt with both descriptive and prescriptive intentions, such as sovereignty, coexist with the transformative social and political processes that unfold in all institutional systems that have been the backbone of sovereign states, whereby the legal system plays a key role. Priban's book takes very seriously...