The article investigates, through a reconstruction of the theoretical debate surrounding the nature of power, the legal legitimacy of sovereignty. Beginning with an elaboration of the origins of political and juridical modernity, around the concept of the State, the essay highlights and defines the nature of national sovereignty’s resistance to the challenges of emerging subjectivities, bearers of rights. From these considerations, I investigate the development of the concept of the ‘state of exception’ as an emergency of sovereignty, against the prospect of contamination. In doing so, I highlight the emergence of a hypothesis of sovereignty as a constituent natural right, along with its deterritorializing function. A concept of sovereignty that takes up the practice of the ‘other’ Spinozistic modernity in the concept of multitude as opposed to that of the people. A new proposal for universal citizenship, within the European tradition.