Political Sovereignty by Woodrow Wilson — Read

The conception of political sovereignty is one of those interesting portions of doctrine which belong in common to several distinct branches of study. No systematic discussion of any part of the science of politics can advance very far without it; and it is even more indispensable to the student of legal systems than to the student of politics. It is a question central to the life of states and to the validity of law.

And it is rendered the more interesting by the fact that it is a critical question, used by all schools alike as a capital test of orthodoxy. No man who cares a whit about his standing among students of law or of politics can afford to approach it lightly. Whatever he says about it he must needs say with a profound sense of responsibility. He must undertake the discussion of it with the same sort of gravity, with the same deep sense of personal risk, that the political economist evinces when he ventures an opinion about Value or hazards a theory of Distribution. When once he has committed himself to an opinion concerning it, he may be sure that with a large and influential number of his fellow-students he can never thereafter pass for a man of undoubted scholarship or unclouded sense.