Kant writes:
only three [forms of sovereignty] are possible: namely, either only one, or some in association, or all those together who constitute the civil society possess sovereign power (autocracy, aristocracy, and democracy …).
The division of the sovereigns into “one”, “some” or “all” members of a society sure sounds like an exhaustive division, at least assuming that there is a sovereign rather than anarchy, which is a fair assumption, since an anarchy probably doesn’t count as a “civil society”.
But not quite! For what if there is a sovereign, but the sovereign is not a member of the civil society? I can think of at least two possibilities like that.
For, a civil society is a mutually interacting body of persons. Thus, first, we could have a personal sovereign with a one-way relationship with the civil society, where the sovereign rules but is in no way affected by what happens in the society. Since causal interaction among embodied beings is always bidirectional, the sovereign would need to be a supernatural being, such as God.
Second, we could have a sovereign that is not a person—a robot overlord. Since only persons can be members of society, such a sovereign would not be a member of society.
One might object that the robot overlord isn’t really a sovereign, since it doesn’t have a will of its own. But it is evident that one could have a fairly functional civil society run by the dictates of a robot overlord, enforced by human or robotic minions, or simply by people’s confidence that the robot overlord’s plan is a good one. If so, and if a robot overlord is not a sovereign, we have a counterexample to the thesis that anarchy is not a civil society.
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