This is, as one might suspect, a radical reconfiguration of sovereign power and one that portends the necessity of a profound rethinking of the relationship between sovereignty and democracy. In the end, this is one of the most important recent books in the growing literature on sovereignty and it is also an exemplary demonstration of the contemporary reinvestments in a supposedly well-known and well-worn text. While many scholars will argue and quibble with Downes’s reading of Hobbes, that almost seems beside the point. If one of the pressing questions of the early twenty-first century is how to think sovereignty, Downes offers one forceful and compelling path forward. At a moment in the United States when representation has been shorn of almost any semblance of legitimacy and the sovereign takes on the pretensions of a farcical dictator, Downes’s exacting, demanding, and provocative reimagining of sovereignty through Hobbes and early American literature is precisely the kind of thinking we need for the democracy, always, to come.

中文翻译：

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后殖民生活叙事：见证交易

正如人们可能怀疑的那样，这是对主权权力的彻底重构，预示着对主权与民主之间的关系进行深刻反思的必要性。最后，这是关于主权的不断增长的文献中最重要的近期著作之一，也是当代对所谓众所周知且陈旧的文本进行再投资的典范。虽然许多学者会与唐斯对霍布斯的阅读争论不休，但这似乎离题了。如果 21 世纪初期的紧迫问题之一是如何思考主权，那么唐斯提供了一条强有力且引人注目的前进道路。在美国，当代表权几乎没有任何合法性的时候，主权者冒充一个可笑的独裁者，