As Prime Minister Putin consolidates his authoritarian rule in Russia, he has introduced a new term in the language of propaganda: “sovereign democracy.” Anyone who follows the news from Russia can see that sovereign democracy is about as close to actual democracy as the old “people’s democracy” of the Soviet period. A sovereign democracy is one that puts political dissidents in jail, murders journalists, expropriates private industry, and makes threatening nationalist pronouncements. The word “democracy” may be preserved as a nod to world opinion, but the weight falls entirely on the adjective, “sovereign,” which in this case is clearly a euphemism for “we’ll do things our own way, and don’t butt in.”

If Mr. Putin were to read Jean Bethke Elshtain’s “Sovereignty: God, State, and Self” (Basic Books, 334 pages, $35), he could congratulate himself on picking precisely the right term for his regime. For the idea of sovereignty, Ms. Elshtain argues in this book based on her 2006 Gifford Lectures, has been associated with the most ominous developments in the modern West.

To be sovereign means to exercise absolute power over one’s self and one’s fate. But another way of putting this is that the sovereign — whether it is a god, a king, a state, or a mere self — cannot be held answerable to anyone. When push comes to shove, sovereignty always trumps law and morals. To Thomas Hobbes, who helped define the modern conception of sovereignty in “Leviathan,” the sovereign ruler is by definition above the law, since, as Ms. Elshtain writes, “laws take the form of his untrammelled will.”

Sovereignty in this sense is quite alien to the American tradition, and indeed the word itself does not appear in the Constitution. To Hannah Arendt, who came to America as a refugee from Nazism, it was precisely the absence of a sovereign that made the American system of government the best in the world. The power of the presidency may be much greater now than the Founding Fathers envisioned, but as the Supreme Court’s recent Boumediene decision shows, even today the executive is “answerable” to the judiciary. No single office or branch of government has the power that King James I, an ardent believer in the divine right of kings, claimed for himself in a striking metaphor: “to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the Chesse.”

It is no coincidence, Ms. Elshtain writes, that King James justified this definition of sovereignty by analogy with God, who similarly “hath power to create, or destroy, make, or unmake at his pleasure.” To say that God is the sovereign of the universe might seem like a commonplace, for by definition God cannot be answerable to any higher power. But in the first and best section of her book, Ms. Elshtain argues that even God was not always conceived of as sovereign in this sense. On the contrary, the first step in what she portrays as a centuries-long expansion of the concept of sovereignty began with a radical redefinition of God himself, by theologians in the 12th and 13th centuries.

For Ms. Elshtain, an eminent political philosopher who teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School, it is the Catholic teaching of Augustine and Aquinas that is the real lost paradise of political thought — a Garden of Eden into which the serpent of sovereignty had not yet slithered. For these saints, God created the universe in accordance with the spirit of love and the principles of justice. Even God’s omnipotence was not “sovereign” or arbitrary, but bound by His benevolence to a structure of laws.

But if Aquinas “retained the inner connection between God’s reason, justice, and love, and the manner in which God wills,” laterthinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham began to think about God’s power in a new way, not in terms of law but in terms of will. If God was omnipotent, they reasoned, he could will absolutely anything: He could change the past (say, by restoring a woman’s virginity, to use a favorite medieval debating point), or he could make good evil and evil good. Indeed, good is only good because God wills it so; goodness is not a matter of law and love but of command and obedience. (Oddly, but in keeping with her exclusive focus on the Christian tradition, Ms. Elshtain does not mention that Plato had addressed the same problem long before, in the Euthyphro, in which Socrates says: “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.”)

To Ms. Elshtain, this is the original sin of Western thought. For if God was an arbitrary ruler, it followed that worldly sovereignty, too, was a mere matter of asserting one’s will. Ms. Elshtain traces the migration of this concept from theology to politics in the first modern philosophers, Machiavelli and Hobbes, who explicitly divorced sovereignty from morality. Later thinkers, from Locke to Hegel, attributed sovereignty to the people or the state, rather than the king, but they did not challenge its arbitrary, all-powerful nature. Nor was this simply a matter of abstract theorizing. “The catastrophe attendant upon the French Revolution,” Ms. Elshtain writes, “demonstrates what a monistic version of sovereignty that exempts nothing, including the secrets of the human heart, looks like in practice.”

In her book’s last third, Ms. Elshtain expands her theological and political critique to contemporary culture, where she believes the self has been exalted to its own kind of sovereignty. If a sovereign God is potentially untrustworthy and a sovereign state totalitarian, a sovereign self — a self conceived in terms of total autonomy and absolute will — is a monster of egotism. The expressions of this egotism, in Ms. Elshtain’s view, include radical feminism, sexual license, abortion rights, eugenics, stem cell research, and cloning. All of these modern phenomena, she writes, flow from a “world shorn of transcendence,” where nothing — not nature, God, or other people — can stand in the way of the self and its sovereignty.

Yet the familiarity of Ms. Elshtain’s targets makes this section of her book the weakest. Rather than offer genuine philosophical arguments against the sovereignty of the individual, she offers polemics and homilies: “One wonders what ever happens to the insistence that we learn to love one another,” she writes, with a sort of plangent irritability. Nor is the reason for this evasiveness far to seek. For natural law, history shows, has an unsettling malleability: It tends to become an honorific for prejudice and custom. Our sense of the natural is constantly evolving — slavery and patriarchy once seemed natural, while in some quarters gay marriage is still stigmatized as unnatural.

Reason, on the other hand, can offer convincing arguments why we should not enslave one another, or prevent one another from loving as we see fit — arguments that depend on and support the principle that we are in fact sovereign over ourselves. Finally, the problem with Ms. Elshtain’s intuitions about what is natural and dignified is that, because they are intuitions, they are not amenable to rational debate.

In retrospect, the same is true of her historical arguments, as well. Her dark portrait of the modern sovereign state depends on a gleaming idealization of medieval Christendom. Reading “Sovereignty,” one never gains a sense of the reasons why the West came to prefer the sovereignty of the individual to the sovereignty of a God whose will is never obvious, but has to be interpreted by human beings with their own failings and selfish interests. Only if you believe that God actually does govern the universe can you excuse human beings from the responsibility, and privilege, of governing themselves.

akirsch@nysun.com