The Absolute Power of the Sovereign, Bureaucracy, Democracy and Constitutional Government in the Works of Slobodan Jovanović

Abstract

The papers discusses the views of Slobodan Jovanović (1869-1958) on several phenomena of Serbia’s political and institutional development in the hundred years between the First Serbian Uprising in 1804 and the fall of the Obrenović dynasty in 1903, and on different political systems, looking at the sources on which his thought drew upon, the ideas he was guided by and the theoretical framework of his legal and socio-political thinking. His major work, a legal theory of the state, as most of his other writings, was his own contribution to what he held to be a national mission, the building of a modern state based on the rule of law.