Anthropomorphism, understood as the attribution of human qualities to collective entities, has played an important role in the historical conceptualizations of the State and of its sovereignty. In this doctoral dissertation, I trace the patterns, purposes and paradoxes of anthropomorphic thinking about the State as the subject of international legal obligations. Hobbes described the State as a person ‘by fiction,’ that needed to be represented by actors who act on its behalf. The theorists of the law of nations, such as Pufendorf, Wolff and Vattel, proposed to view the State as a ‘moral person’ characterized by the ‘will’ and ‘intellect’ of its own. The anthropomorphism of the State has reached its extreme manifestation in the organic theories of law. Bluntschli and Gierke saw the State as a living organism, a metaphysical and divine ‘person’ that subsumed the identities of individuals. This view of the State has been criticized by jurists such as Hans Kelsen, who proposed to view the State as a ‘legal fiction’ instead. The rich history of debate about personhood and sovereignty of the anthropomorphic State testifies to the importance of the topic to our conceptualizations of the State as the subject of international law. The dissertation ends with a section dedicated to the dispersion of sovereignty of the State, brought about by new epistemic and technological developments. New technologies force us to rethink sovereignty and personality of the State. I therefore propose the model of law as a ‘network’ and infrastructural approaches to law as more suitable alternatives for thinking about the law in times of globalization and technological change.