The article reports that the promise of sovereignty upon which the social contract is ostensibly based cannot be guaranteed by any prior order of the promise and cannot be bound by any existing compact; it must be free of them and free of the promise itself. This freedom of the promise to begin with itself and to establish an agreement of its own accord, independent of other or prior contractual obligations. The social contract and the promise it is based upon appear in their highest representative, the sovereign, the state, the Leviathan as a figure of inconsistency. But this figure is nevertheless no less real; it is even the ens realissimum in the realm of finite existence. The state is the macroinstitute that conducts national civil war or international class warfare, although the administration of war can counter it at best with normative-moralist slogans, but nothing, beyond the contested interests of capital and work, that could guarantee it substance and permanence. As the organizational form of war, the state is empty and itself an agent of the emptying out of what is assembled within it. The future of democracy, which has thus far been dependent upon it and will remain so for the foreseeable future, must be determined in relation to the armed emptiness of its forms of sovereignty, the sovereignty of representatives; the sovereignty of states, state alliances, and institutes of justice; and the sovereignty of capital and its international corporations.