"Sovereign" comes from Vulgar Latin *superanus, meaning "chief, principal."
So *superanus = "of/belonging to that which is above."
Italian connection: soprano comes from the same Latin root. The highest voice - the one above.
The word entered English in the late 13th century as soverain, meaning "superior, ruler, master, one who is superior to or has power over another." By c. 1300 it meant specifically "a king or queen, one who exercises dominion over people."
In his Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes abstracted the concept: his sovereign was not necessarily a person but an office - an artificial person representing the state. This move detached sovereignty from flesh-and-blood monarchs and attached it to the abstract commonwealth itself. Where previous thinkers saw a supreme king, Hobbes saw a function that could be filled by monarch, aristocracy, or democracy alike.
By the 18th century, sovereignty shifted to mean supreme authority within a territory, with multiple sovereigns recognizing each other as equals. Many that are highest, with none above - but not each claiming to be higher than all the others. (The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is often credited with establishing this system, though scholars note this is partly a retcon - the treaties never mention sovereignty, and the concept developed gradually.)
In the 21st century the concept evolved further. "Data sovereignty" asserts national jurisdiction over information within borders - Westphalian logic applied to servers. "Self-sovereign identity" in crypto circles sees the individual as their own jurisdiction, holding keys no authority can revoke.
The semantic core has shifted from emphasizing authority over those below to emphasizing freedom from any above.
Footnote: The asterisk in eg *superanus* marks it as a reconstructed form - a word that linguists believe existed but isn't found in surviving texts. Classical Latin texts don't contain this word, but linguists reconstruct it because the Romance language cognates (French souverain, Spanish soberano, Italian sovrano) all point back to this form, and it follows regular Latin word-formation patterns. The asterisks on PIE forms (*uper*, *-no-*) work the same way - reconstructed proto-forms that predate written records entirely.
2025-12-11