The recent movie “The King’s Speech,” has been well and broadly reviewed for the wonderful acting of stars Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. The film recounts the story of the arduous treatment of King George VI of England’s debilitating stutter. While the film tells a story of what media pundits call “an unlikely friendship” between Lionel Logue, an Australian actor manqué who has developed a speech defects practice and the imminently to-be-crowned British monarch, it addresses many issues relevant to the mystery of sovereignty itself. As we approach President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union address, and think about our own executive’s voice, “The King’s Voice” can be gainsaid for the way it animates key sociological insights into the nature of political legitimacy, sovereignty, democracy, and the role of the leader’s rhetoric in binding a nation together (especially a nation at war).

Ever since Ernst Kantorowicz analyzed the medieval theological innovation of the “king’s two bodies,” (a theology that managed the contradictory ideas that the king is divine and thus immortal and that the king is mortal and thus vulnerable to corruption and disease), we have recognized the ways in which real-world kings and presidents have been maneuvering to appear human and transcendent simultaneously. Other sociological and anthropological work on transcendence, political ritual, war and legitimacy (Durkheim, Weber, and Geertz spring to mind) has made us conscious of the ways that rulers use their bodies and their voices to demonstrate and symbolize the collectivities they rule. Historically they have done so by highlighting their sovereign exceptionalism. At the same time, an American democratic diffidence toward transcendence and the divine has also insisted that our leaders be “just like us.”

“The King’s Speech” draws our attention to the role of the voice of the monarch in addressing the nation and, in moments of national peril, literally constituting the nation as a self-conscious entity ready to make sacrifices. George VI, catapulted by the abdication of his older brother into being king, must make an important speech as Britain goes to war in September 1939. He stutters badly under . . .

Read more: The King’s Speech, the President’s Speech