This chapter begins with a critique of the tendency, common to Schmitt and Agamben (and their followers), to reduce the phenomenon of sovereignty to a largely unhistorical structural category. Opposing itself to the recent critical trend toward understanding sovereignty as the logical outcome of conceptual conflict, the chapter advocates instead for a Hegelian analysis of the concrete universals and actual institutions that generate the moment of sovereign decision. This reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right not only explicates the universalizing ethical life of a modern society; it goes further by arguing that only a discussion of subjectivity, irony, and evil allows us to deduce the monarch’s exceptional executive powers from Hegel’s thought.