It is a mistake to think that modern sovereignty is merely a restaurant of old ideas about power and authority. The elements may be present in different forms, especially in Roman law and in certain theological accounts of God’s power. But the conception of political power that is thereby attached to a new type of political order is novel : ‘at the beginning, the idea of sovereignty was the idea that there is a final and absolute political authority in the political community … and no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere’(Hinsley, 1986: 25-6). The concept of the modern state in fact develops along with that of sovereignty. This is evident in the work of the master theorist of the modern state, where sovereignty is the ‘Artificiall Soul’ of ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS)’ (Hobbes, 1651 : introduction,9).