Abstract
These two books mark a new era in historical thought about the idea of sovereignty in general and popular sovereignty in particular. Not as concerned as previous iterations of historicist thought with correcting interpretations of political theorists and political ideas that paid no attention to their character as human creations in space, time, and language, the essays in each volume fulsomely address political ideas or concepts amid the complex currents of politics, history, and critical thought. 1
These efforts to adapt the conceptual analysis and intellectual history of political thought more directly to our lives warrant the attention of political theorists. But garnering that attention will be difficult. Ever since deconstruction and Foucault’s “history of the present” began to populate the perspectives of humanist scholars in the 1980s—over thirty-five years ago—critiques of the rational coherence of concepts and their dependence on power led many to take the unnecessary and misguided step of losing interest in history itself as a political factor in social relations. History, after all, depends on vertical and horizontal connections, and if every connection is dangerous, why bother reconstructing them respectfully and seriously? On the other hand, even those of us enthralled by, say, postmodernisms, postcolonialisms; the disintegration and castigation of identity focused around sex, gender, race, class and religion of the nation, “Western civilization,” and reading the globe as our oyster as it melts in the midst of political fecklessness, must wonder, “How did we get here?” and “How might we change course?” Moreover, historical understanding naturally reaches our reflection on our selves. Most of us would prefer both not to be forgotten and to be remembered with a good measure of fidelity to the lives we led and the works we produced. Still, the task of making historical work resonate for contemporary political theory is daunting, for our changing world highlights the old-fashioned vocabulary of our political language. Just think: terms for regimes and citizenship were invented 2,500 years ago; Marx’s denotative innovations regarding ideology, production, and class struggle now clearly appear overly one-dimensional; Nietzsche’s identification of the ethical sociopathy of ressentiment offers important new political perspectives about what is but precious little insight into what ought to be; Freud’s critique of the solid self cannot fully illuminate the more loosely knit selves of today that navigate predicaments and experience injustices; Weberian perspectives mostly inform anguish, and Arendt’s genius was indelibly marked by the limits of liberal-Marxist economisms and the legacies of totalitarianisms.
Even in the wake of imaginative and insightful treatments of history for political theory by Arendt, Wolin, Shklar, Dunn, and Skinner, Pitkin, and Pateman – who showed how the past could be so much more for us than recollections of names, facts, and ideas— anti-historical trends easily gained traction in the United States given the anti-historical intellectual bent of American culture. This culture has been deeply shaped by Founders who wanted to regulate history; the White Man who sought to obscure conquests of Native Americans and the effects of living off of the enslavement of African-Americans, and immigrants who wanted to leave much of their past behind. This trend to neglect the past in the name of the future or the new has spread by virtue of the anti-historical, neo-Orwellian elements of technology and capitalism, which digitize and fragment human experience, sundering practical human associations so as to profitably regulate social life. Globalization also has encouraged us to look horizontally beyond our horizons, usefully breaking down barriers of space and culture so that we can understand better the differences among human societies. The effects of globalization on political life are obviously widespread but also elusive. They surely warrant efforts to identify them, but, as with many good things, such attempts can distort political understanding. Indeed, I would argue that these efforts have diminished our appreciation of the political significance of time and history, turning our attention away from the extent to which the trails we tread have been blazed by others. One might mark the end of anti-historicality with the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, if not the Brexit referendum of June 23, 2016, but it persists, along with myopia that stems from ignorance of the past. Americans are stumped by Donald Trump and flail about for antecedents. Our hyper-active, media-driven news cycles most easily fill their time and appeal to viewers’ anxieties by irresponsibly speculating about the unknowable future rather than providing useful perspectives rooted in our useable pasts.
Inattention to history, particularly in the United States, could be said to have cost Americans dearly in understanding domestic politics and foreign affairs—iterating a warning offered sixty years ago by Louis Hartz when he explained why American liberalism had anti-historical features that blinded American political understanding (including his own), especially in foreign affairs. After all, might not developments in the Middle East have been ameliorated with less violence if the combatants and invaders attended more fully to the histories of the warring parties—whether they be Palestinians or Jewish Israelis, Shiites or Sunnis, or the long history of the defeats of invaders trying to dominate the mountainous landscape of Afghanistan? Might not whitish Americans understand African Americans better if they traveled with them through their experiences of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and socio-economic ostracism, which has degraded and depoliticized them for over four hundred years; Native Americans in terms of the White Man’s genocidal wars on them; Hispanics who, before Anglo-American culture reached the Pacific, cultured most of the southwestern portions of the United States?
These points should not be heard as defensive and pleaful, qualities that do not mark the expert essays in these two books, composed by deservedly eminent scholars. Quentin Skinner was involved in editing both volumes, but the two collections move in opposite directions and display no single intellectual mindset. Despite the transformation of political conditions over the past four or five hundred years, “sovereignty” retains political significance—in the face of Foucault’s tart recommendation that, because it distracts our attention from more oppressive social powers, we should cut off the king’s head in political theory. One only has to reflect on its rhetorical roles in political agitation about the European Union, Brexit, and the American presidential campaign. So how are we to understand now an idea that was used to sanction state power in the early modern era? Is it mostly a vestige of absolutism, and a rhetorical tool for justifying a state’s power over and often against its citizens? After all, “sovereignty” is not part of the political vocabulary of the United States, which attained its identity by routing the British royals, and the well-known American political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, long ago lamented that America’s democratic traditions prevented it from fully appreciating the value of the sovereign state. Weber ignored the concept of sovereignty (which left it to fellow nationals, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, to exploit). To what extent is it a product of law, politics, religion, or desperation to constitute political unities that are increasingly undermined by global power and resentful individuals? How does the concept of sovereignty or the language of sovereignty, at once reflect and constitute the societies it would regulate? 2 What does “sovereignty” do, especially when it is, according to one set of the editors, “a concept in fragments” (25)? I will discuss these volumes in the order of their publication, mentioning all of the contributions but focusing on how certain articles address the themes of “sovereignty” and “the state” in the first volume and “popular sovereignty” and “democracy” in the second.
The first volume emphasizes the disparity and diversionary paths taken by “the concept of sovereignty” in the eyes of legal and political theorists along with intellectual historians and international relations theorists. While all address sovereignty as a “concept,” that term is understood loosely and indirectly, more according to the OED than to Kant—that is, “concept” as a general notion or idea of a class of objects, wherever they may be found, rather than a categorical feature of reason itself. For Skinner, via his reading of Wittgenstein, the meanings of concepts appear in their uses, and he and Hent Kalmo have attracted a group of contributions that note diverse historical situations and conceptual relations that refract power and political practices. The eleven essays of Sovereignty in Fragments (SF) are organized analytically—in terms of sovereignty’s modern historical lineage (Skinner; Denis Baranger; Partel Piirimae, focusing, respectively, on Bodin; mostly Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; Grotius); its ethical relation to just war theory (Piirimae, Jean Bartelson); its unitary or fragmentary character (Kalmo, invoking recent French theory); its incoherent persistence (Stephen Krasner, Michel Troper); its alteration by the EU (not to mention the challenge posed by the Palestinian question); the existence of “post-sovereign” political arrangements (Neil McCormick, Patrick Praet, Juri Lipping); the political supersession of sovereignty and the effect of globalization on sovereignty’s implicit divide between domestic and foreign politics (Piirimae; Antonio Negri).
Kalmo and Skinner introduce SF by making a coherent argument about a fragmentary phenomenon, to wit: the interdependence between the fragmentation of state power (not necessarily its reduction) and the fragmentation of the concept of sovereignty. For just as the state is now more evidently embattled by unmanageable political problems generated by diverse socioeconomic powers and currents, so, too, is it more difficult to offer a unified account of the concept of sovereignty. Ever since Bodin and Hobbes, “sovereignty” designated the authority and properly superior powers of the state as a coherent, independent, mostly absolute power that stands over and above the extant political order. It signifies the facticity of the state and asserts its value above the political community—hence, the antipathy of both Bodin and Hobbes to Aristotle, who linked real, proper, and virtuous political rule to a well-functioning politeia (“a community of citizens”). The politeia, qua monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, polity, or democracy, legitimately functioned by means of the agency of some portion of the people. For the Catholic Bodin, the political idea of sovereignty presumably draws on the Hebrew Bible and the papacy as the metaphorically permanent representative of God/post-resurrection Christ on earth. Here’s the way Bodin succinctly puts it in Ch. 1, Bk. 8 of his Les six livres de la republique, first published in 1576: “the main point of sovereign majesty and absolute power consists of giving the law to subjects in general without their consent.” 3 This feature of sovereignty as an absolute power that rules over the people without their consent is taken up by Hobbes, who hardly draws on the imago of the papacy. But for both Bodin and Hobbes, sovereignty is theoretically restricted by natural law, which for Bodin clearly accords with divine will but for Hobbes more ambiguously so. For Rousseau, sovereignty only could be legitimate if exercised by the general will—a critical ideal nonetheless rooted in the participatory judgment of all (male) citizens. These authors recognize the ethical pretensions associated with sovereignty but in analyzing its uses deny ethics any independent role other than natural law as interpreted by the sovereign, so as to stay closer to actual discursive practices.
An article about the genealogy of sovereignty by Quentin Skinner launches the volume. Not surprisingly but importantly, he draws on Thomas Hobbes to delineate the character of sovereignty as the “persona ficta” of the state. Skinner takes on those who read sovereignty as an obsolete, epiphenomenal, or pejoratively ideological concept because of his view that, short of the unlikely near-term emergence of a global state, states will continue to be major players in world affairs and we need to recognize their agency—which only can be identified in terms of sovereignty, not just the raw material of statehood. This is an important point for the second volume as well as this one, albeit troublesome. For even as states do not adequately frame or channel the political power coursing through them, they provide the principal spaces in which collective power can act. Of course, this is problematic, because reactionary, nationalist elements from the nineteenth century to the present have made the state their tool and nourished racist sentiments, but Skinner’s argument also can be seen in a different light. For if democracy is to have agency, it will need to reach some kind of (tense) partnership with state power because of its provision of the most plausible public realms in which the demos might exercise political kratos. Indeed, insofar as “democracy” metonymizes the legitimate state today, this phenomenon engages the relationship between not only sovereignty and the state but sovereignty and popular sovereignty or democracy. Michel Troper’s article delineates connections between sovereignty and democratic rights.
The sovereignty-state connection becomes problematic in its own right, however, if the agency of the state as a sovereign no longer is principally unitary. That is what animates Neil McCormick and Patrick Praet’s interests in “post-sovereignty.” The value of this concept is somewhat harder to imagine in the Western hemisphere, where the chaotic character of the EU does not upset political thinking on a daily basis. But Juri Lipping and Antonio Negri draw on Schmitt, Derrida, and Spinoza to clarify the political character of the indeterminate (i.e., sovereign but exceptional) space of the political that circulates around and within the fractured phenomenon of contemporary sovereignty. I’m not sure where these latter considerations leave us, however, if we are to connect the abiding significance of sovereignty to effective political power, on behalf of democracy or anything else.
The substantive essays in PSHP begin with ancient Athens, despite the fact that the phrase “popular sovereignty” is not used in actual political discourse until the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century. Moreover, a history of “popular sovereignty” has been regarded (by, e.g., de Maistre) as an oxymoron. For the populus or il populo or “the people” never directly and authoritatively exercises political power (although it may variously constitute power). Popular politics always stem from “below” and interact with a government or government-in-waiting which is always “above” or “superior” (sovereign=soveranus). Even the authorization of a constitution is generally from top to bottom to top, as in the American and French constitutions. Notably and ironically, the actual couplet, “popular sovereignty,” in whatever language (though principally French) came into practical, political use when “the people” officially ceded practical power to a governing “state,” thereby securing their position in the lower, rather than the higher, echelon of power. To be sure, Bodin mentions the notion of “l’estat populaire” in Republique, only to condemn it as self-destructive. And the unadopted French Constitution of 1793 mentions “the people” exercising its “sovereignty” in various ways, but even there or in the Jacobinite rhetoric I have read, the phrase “popular sovereignty” does not occur. 4 As a result, “popular sovereignty” is mostly a rhetorical hanger for placing one’s interpretive hat. In most of the essays of PSHP, “popular sovereignty” is a theoretical construction by the book’s authors, different for each one, that does or does not plausibly direct one to a conceptually and/or practically coherent use of the term. But that’s okay, because the authors are also discussing the coherence of justifications for popular authority or power—one might say, democracy (although its meaning also is fungible)—in various political orders. The invocation of “popular sovereignty” (as with most political terms used in public) is more of a rhetorical idea than a practical, political concept, a call for popular legitimation (whatever satisfies that criterion in political actualities), rather than a clear instance of a practical exercise of superior political power. The value of these essays vaults past these semantic concerns, but they make one wonder when reading PSHP what exactly is the thread connecting the essays.
PSHP proceeds chronologically, beginning unconventionally with ancient Greece. (In his Introduction, Richard Bourke explicitly defends the book’s admittedly unconventional view of popular sovereignty as a pre-modern as well as modern idea.) Its editors and contributors seek a tradition, if not commonalities, for the “concept,” “doctrine,” “idea,” or “principle” of “popular sovereignty” across time. The thirteen essays, all of which are well-written and scholarly, deal with the following topics as seen by the following authors. The book begins with two discussions of Athenian democratic thought—in Athenian institutions and Aristotle’s Politics (Kinch Hoekstra; Melissa Lane); moves to Cicero (Valentina Arena); hops over to Marsilius of Padua’s conceptualization of the relationship between the popolo and the law; zeroes in on the precursors and responses to the English Civil War—starting with Bodin, interpreting Henry Parker and the Parliamentarians, and ending with interesting foregrounds of Hobbes against the backgrounds of royalism, Parliamentarism, and the Levellers (Richard Tuck, Alan Cromartie, Lorenzo Sabbadini); briefly crosses the ocean for an account of “popular sovereignty” and the American founding (Eric Nelson); enters Burke and Smith into the canon of popular sovereignty theorists (Richard Bourke); links Constant and Tocqueville as theoretical kin (Bryan Garsten); moves over to nineteenth-century German attempts (mostly Bluntschli) to accommodate state power and popular sovereignty; reaches into the subject states of the British empire to find seeds of different kinds of popular sovereignty (Karuna Mantena), and closes with a discussion of Weber, Kelsen, and Schmitt’s political theories as interpretations of democratic legitimacy—found to be instructive from the early twentieth century to the present, the age of “mass democracy” (Timothy Stanton). Two relevant authors and issues not extensively addressed in terms of popular sovereignty are Locke and his justification of revolution in the 1680s and the use of popular sovereignty by Stephen Douglas (contra Lincoln) in the 1850s supporting states’ rights to sanction slavery over and against the American national government’s right to outlaw it.
Three issues stand out and preoccupy the authors. The first seeks to identify in relatively high-brow texts a principle or concept (sc., logos) that authorizes some signifier of the people, whether that be the Athenian demos or some subset of the English citizenry, including potentially the King, Parliament, or individual Englishmen in relation to a formal argument or institutional form. This leads to a perceived need to identify useful means of justifying popular sovereignty and democratic power. The second explores the emergence of the sovereignty–government distinction as a feature of political theory, from Bodin to Rousseau (stopping over in England along the way). This speaks to the issue of what and how political theorists contribute helpfully to understanding and promoting popular sovereignty. It obliquely attends to the relationship between modern ideas of the sovereignty of the people and the means by which “the people” might actually exercise (or have exercised for them) “power.” This raises the conundrum that afflicts invocations of democracy or popular sovereignty in post-ancient societies. For uses of “democracy” since then are overlain by schemes of representation that empower a few over the many (and now are in disrepute). They focus conventionally, but perhaps unfairly, on how “democracy” since the French Revolution can inspire fear of a tyrannical majority or dictatorial, plebiscitary leadership or signify the best path to social justice. I address articles in PSHP that most directly engage these issues (without devaluing of articles that receive less attention).
The initial articles about “popular sovereignty” in ancient Greece make two controversial arguments. The received view is that “popular sovereignty” did not exist in Athenian democracy, because there was no linguistic or conceptual equivalent. They no more “had” the concept of “sovereignty” than “human rights” (as Myles Burnyeat importantly argued in the 1990s). Both Hoekstra and Lane link the political practices, literary references, and theoretical justifications of democracy in ancient Athens to popular sovereignty—with Hoekstra making the link via the trope of the demos as tyrannos and Lane via an interpretation of Aristotle that highlights “office” rather than demotic agency as the sine qua non of Athenian democracy. These are interesting arguments as interpretations of the meaning of Athenian democracy, but the connections to “popular sovereignty” remain strained. The second issue, of the establishment of state sovereignty in a mode that expresses constitutional support for democracy, also is controversial but illuminating. Richard Tuck clearly documents the emergence of the sovereignty–government distinction—which functions prominently in the political theories of Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau—and rightly identifies it as an important advance in political thought that sets the stage for the theoretical reconciliation of popular sovereignty and state power. Whether it works to the benefit of democracy is not as convincingly answered. Lorenzo Sabbadini elucidates tellingly how Hobbes’s covenant theory of sovereignty takes on both royalists and Parliamentarians (e.g., Henry Parker) while co-opting Levellers’s ideas, thereby enabling his theory to act as a background for both authoritarian and democratic political thought. Timothy Stanton’s wide-ranging article rightly discusses recent theories of popular sovereignty in relation to modern democracy by interpreting the work of Max Weber—reading it less as a potential ideology of democracy or decisionism than as a poignant engagement with important dilemmas of legitimation in modern societies. In the latter part of the article, Stanton formulates a recipe for modern political thought out of the ingredients of Kelsen, Schmitt, Rawls, and Habermas (while quickly and inaccurately dismissing Sheldon Wolin’s democratic thought). The result is a resigned affirmation of liberal-republican aspirations that unfortunately does not direct us toward understanding better the relationship between popular sovereignty and democracy.
The idea or principle or concept or name of sovereignty is perplexing, troubling, and a necessary feature of our political discourse and, hence, practices. Its use also affects our conceptions of democratic possibilities—as sovereignty per se or popular sovereignty. Today, these terms operate in contexts much different from the ones out of which they came, yet noting the relationship between past and present reveals insufficiently appreciated lineages that factor in our politics and lives. Still, the fact that these collections are so well focused on “sovereignty” also may betray limitations in the collections as wholes. For, like all political concepts, sovereignty is more a naming device than an independent power in the world. Official documents that involve its use over the past half-century reflect this. For example, sovereignty may be enshrined by the terms of membership in the United Nations; only states that exercise respected sovereignty are allowed. But the word does not appear in the United Nations Charter and only appears in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as something to be overridden (Article 2). Moreover, recent efforts by that nebulous entity known as “the international community” to protect human rights further justify the violation of state sovereignty—namely, the (mostly discredited but still standing) doctrine of “the responsibility to protect.”
The stability of any concept of sovereignty, therefore, is radically limited. To understand it fully, we must embed it in striata of linguistic and practical powers that not only support but constitute it. Sovereignty’s disciplinary traditions guide the work of scholars more than they explain sovereignty as a phenomenon. The authors of these collections know this but perhaps could illustrate their knowledge more directly, so as to reflect the way in which sovereignty’s instability stems from its being political—part of the dynamic of human action. Still, these collections about the past and present of sovereignty and popular sovereignty usefully point out their unsettling, fragmented features in our world. The results provide enormous aids and education for our political understandings.