If 12-tons of sculpted neoclassical marble doesn’t shout ‘Sovereignty!’ what does? George Washington never looked so sovereign (or Greek) as he did in Horatio Greenough’s 1832 sculpture. And that was the point, right? Commissioned by the Federal Government on the occasion of Washington’s centennial year, an “Olympian Zeus” version of the nation’s first president, made to order and set squarely in the rotunda of Congress, this Washington reached back into mystical antiquity to press home the point that a sovereign nation -called the United States of America – now bore full legitimacy to govern the expansive domain of a a people and a continent.
Our History
Welcome to the age of discourse dumping, are you dizzy? Do you study emoji eyes to find your facial recognition? Does the world look like a Cubist painting? Is the phrase ‘rubber baby buggy bumper’ starting to make sense? Not to worry. We are here to reassure you that the White Knight is, in fact, talking backwards and the inmates are indeed running the asylum. Our prescription: put the lime in the coconut and drink them both together, listen to Episode 72, and then you’ll feel better. HAG is, after all, the Harry Nilsson of history podcasts, and our very special guest today is Moritz Mihatsch, Cambridge scholar and co-author (with Michael Mulligan) of Shifting Sovereignties (available now). Their terrific new book offers an illuminating journey through the global history of what power has forever wanted you to believe, i.e. that the right folks are in charge. Excavating the meaning of sovereignty from the sedimentary layers of the human past, our guest explains why governing has always relied on a Wizard of Oz-like control over sound and color, equal parts legal pretense and quasi-religious authority, to create cover for whatever power wishes to do. So click your heels twice, repeat “there’s no home like HAG, there’s no home like HAG,” and settle in for more therapeutic historical analysis of a world trying to make us crazy.
Click to Hear Shifting Sovereignties
Sources Referenced and Items of Interest
Moritz Mihatsch and Michael Mulligan, Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice (2025)
Megan O’Rourke, “The End of the University as We Know It” The New York Times (March 16, 2025)
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All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development– in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver– but also because of their systematic structure.
Carl Schmidt
History Against the Grain 