Sovereignty refers to the ultimate authority within a state or territory. It entails a hierarchy within the state and autonomy externally. In a state, sovereignty is assigned to the entity that has authority to establish or change laws. In political theory, sovereignty designates supreme authority over a polity. While sovereignty is often viewed as absolute, this is not truly the case. All sovereignty is necessarily limited by its underlying conditions. Both individuals and states face various constraints on their sovereignty without losing it altogether. Theorists of the modern era increasingly saw state sovereignty as limited rather than absolute. Understanding sovereignty as limited rather than absolute allows for states to cooperate and limit their sovereignty while still maintaining their sovereign status.

1. Sovereignty is the defining authority within an individual consciousness, social construct or
territory.[1]
Sovereignty entails hierarchy within the state, as well as external autonomy for
states.[2]
In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body, or institution that has the
ultimate authority over other people in order to establish a law or change an existing law.[3]
In
political theory, sovereignty is a substantive term designating supreme legitimate authority over
some polity.[4]
In international law, sovereignty is the exercise of power by a state. De
jure sovereignty refers to the legal right to do so; de facto sovereignty refers to the factual ability
to do so. This can become an issue of special concern upon the failure of the usual expectation
that de jure and de facto sovereignty exist at the place and time of concern, and reside within the
same organization.
POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY
Popular sovereignty roughly means the power of the masses as contrasted with the
Power of the individual ruler of the class. It implies manhood, suffrage, with each
individual having only one vote and the control of the legislature by the
representatives of the people. In popular sovereignty public is regarded as supreme.
In the ancient times many writers on Political Science used popular sovereignty as
a weapon to refute absolutism of the monarchs.
According to Dr. Garner, “Sovereignty of the people, therefore, can mean nothing
more than the power of the majority of the electorate, in a country where a system
of approximate universal suffrage prevails, acting through legally established
channels to express their will and make it prevail”
Difference between
it can be argued that Rousseau develops a theory of popular sovereignty. Popular
sovereignty is the belief that the legitimacy of the state is created by the
consent, or the will of its people. n Rousseau's time, the sovereign was usually an
absolute monarch. In The Social Contract, however, this word is given a new
meaning. In a healthy republic, Rousseau defines the sovereign as all the citizens
acting collectively. Together, they voice the general will and the laws of the state.
he modern meaning of sovereignty (but not popular sovereignty) was
introduced by Jean Bodin in 1576. According to the New Columbia
Encyclopedia, sovereignty is "the supreme authority in a political
community".
The origin of popular sovereignty, on the other hand, goes most directly
back to what is called the social contract school of the mid 1600s to the mid
1700s. Popular sovereignty is the notion that no law or rule is legitimate
unless it rests directly or indirectly on the consent of the individuals
concerned.

2. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-1778) were the most important members of the social
contract school. They all postulated that the nature of society, whatever its
origins, was a contractual arrangement between its members. The reason
men entered society was to protect themselves against the dangers of the
"state of nature". But, their theories differed markedly in other respects.
Hobbes in Leviathan, published 1651, claimed that the first and only task of
political society was to name an individual or a group of individuals as
sovereign. This sovereign would then have absolute power, and each
citizen would owe him absolute obedience. Hobbes concept meant that
popular sovereignty only existed momentarily. In modern terms we might
say that it consisted of "one man, one vote, once".
Locke in his writings e.g. Second Treatise of Government, published 1690,
claimed as Hobbes before him, that the social contract was permanent and
irrevocable, but the legislative was only empowered to legislate for the
public good. If this trust was violated, the people retained the power to
replace the legislative with a new legislative. It is unclear whether Locke
deposited sovereignty in the people or in the legislative. Though he was
less absolute than Hobbes, he clearly didn't intend popular intervention to
be commonplace. If anything, Locke's vision is probably closer to the
British view of Parliamentary sovereignty.
Rousseau (e.g. The Social Contract, 1762) claimed that laws enacted by
the legislature could only address the common good of the society's
members and they could only extend the same rights or obligations to all
citizens. Rousseau, however, didn't elaborate on what would happen if
these conditions were violated, but he did propose mechanisms to find out
what the "general will" was and he did see the legislative powers as vested
in the people itself.
Thus there was a development in political theory from the very limited role
played by the people in Hobbes' theories, to the more significant popular
sovereignty of Rousseau.
ABSOLUTE SOVERIGNTY
State sovereignty is often thought to be and seen as absolute, unlimited. However, there
is no such a thing as absolute State sovereignty. Indeed, absolute or unlimited

3. sovereignty is impossible because all sovereignty is necessarily underpinned by its
conditions of possibility. The present article consists of two main parts. Firstly, and in
order to show more clearly how sovereignty is limited, two kinds of agents are
introduced: a) individuals; and b) States. The aim is to demonstrate how different sorts
of constraints or limitations operate in relation to individuals and States without
diminishing their respective sovereignties. Secondly, the article identifies specific
theorists or bodies of literature that take sovereignty to be absolute and provides a brief
overview of a few major thinkers who consider sovereignty to be limited in the Modern
era that followed the theories of Bodin and Hobbes. The implications of understanding
State sovereignty as limited rather than absolute are several, both directly and
indirectly. A main immediate consequence is that sovereign States can cooperate
together, limit their sovereignty and still be considered sovereign.