As increasingly recognized, medieval and early modern corporations were influential models for the emerging European state. E E xisting scholarship documents the influence of the corporation’s constitutionalism on the constitutionalism of the state. T T his article documents the separate influence of the corporation in imparting “juridical personhood” to the state – —the capacity to own and contract as an individual. T T his is a feature of all modern states, regardless of constitutional order, that vastly augments their power and makes possible the current international state system. C C ontrary to reigning assumptions, it did not automatically follow from borrowing the corporation’s constitutional structure, but was a distinct historical development. J J uridical personhood passed from the (corporate) bishopric to the kingdoms of Europe via the medieval bishop–~king analogy. T T he chapter examines this history in England and the Continent, then relates how the American founders resolved the longstanding tension between state sovereignty and state juridicality, i.e.that is, that the state is sovereign yet is under the rule of law and, for example, bound by its contracts. T T he chapter also clears up some modern conceptual confusions regarding peoples, states, and governments.

This chapter theorizes that sovereignty is the interplay of two contrasting modalities. In Idealized Sovereignty, sovereign authority is represented exclusively in “the state” per the doctrine of indivisibility developed by early modern theorists and reified in IR theory. In Lived Sovereignty, achieving sovereign competence involves divisible practices of state and nonstate actors in a variety of social relations. We would do a disservice to sovereignty’s complexity if only one of the two modes persevered in analyses of sovereignty. Instead, the chapter intervenes in major IR debates to argue that sovereignty should be hybridized. This overarching framework guides the ideal-types of public/private hybridity developed in the next chapter and the empirical analyses in the remainder of this book, where hybrid sovereignty is necessary to build a global empire, go to war, regulate global markets, and protect rights.