Graeber / Wengrow 395: "Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves"
This "establishes the kind as potential lawmaker and high tribunal"
However, "insofar as such a figure does manage to establish themsevles as genuinely standing above the law—in other words, as sacred or set apart—another apparently universal principle kicks in: in order to keep him apart from the muck and mire of ordinary human life, that same figure becomes surrounded with restrictions"
"the containment of kings," surrounding them with an "endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces"
"For most of history, this was the internal dynamic of sovereignty"