Laurent Dubois

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Laurent Dubois | Reviews of Books: Declarations and States | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.2 | The History Cooperative

Declarations and States

THE wide-ranging forays generated by this forum confirm, I think, the importance of David Armitage's contribution and the many issues and questions it opens up. I have little more to add, except to agree with Lynn Hunt's assessment that ultimately the question of power, and of the ways in which violence and mass mobilization made possible the rooting of imagined institutions in a particular political landscape, is crucially important to our understanding of the evolution of sovereignty as an idea and a practice. This conclusion was what I was gesturing toward in my own reflections about the divergent fates of institutions called into existence by declarations of independence. The world order produced by the "cascade" of such declarations, after all, is infused with a remarkable level of differentiation and hierarchy that we need to confront as we think through the political history of the last two and one-half centuries.¹

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