Popular Sovereignty: The Will of the People in Historical Perspective

This network is designed to produce a collaborative history of the idea of popular sovereignty. This will be achieved by pooling the expertise of a group of international scholars selected from across a range of academic disciplines. There currently exists no comprehensive study dedicated to charting the emergence and transformation of this fundamental part of our political heritage. Our aim is therefore to trace for the first time the complex and controversial career of popular sovereignty across ancient and modern history. This will not only result in an original historical account of one of our basic political values, but it will also illuminate the extent to which popular sovereignty provides one of the basic frameworks for understanding modern politics.

Our first objective is to investigate ancient Greek attempts to reconcile democracy with a mixed system of government as pursued from Thucydides to Aristotle, and then to examine the effort to reconcile the sovereignty of the people with prevailing ideas of political justice in Roman political thought. Our next objective is to trace the Roman legacy through the republicanism of the Italian city-states of the late middle ages, and then to examine its subsequent adaptation through a succession of early modern thinkers including Bodin, Hobbes and Rousseau. A further objective of the network will be to explore debates about the relationship between the sovereignty of the people and the institutions of representative government in the revolutionary decades of the 1770s and 1780s in America and France, before studying the reemergence of popular sovereignty in the controversies that surrounded nineteenth-century nationalism. Claims to popular sovereignty stood at the centre of twentieth-century political disputes as attempts were made to reconcile the will of the people with the institution of the rule of law. Accordingly, our next objective will be to consider the contest between populism and constitutionalism in Weimar Germany, and then to conclude with an investigation of the role played by the idea of self-determination in anti-imperial thought down to the 1940s.

The historical work of the network culminates in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, but the project is designed to improve our understanding of the impact of ideas about popular sovereignty on contemporary disputes over such issues as political union and secession, federalism and devolution, political power and popular consent, and legitimacy within the international order. Our claim is that a broader historical perspective offers the best means of evaluating our current predicament. Our aim is not to produce a narrative of cumulative progress in which the doctrine of popular sovereignty achieves its final fulfillment in contemporary liberal democracies, but rather to explore the processes of contingent adaptation and reinterpretation to which the idea has been variously subjected.

The findings of the network will have concrete applications to issues of major concern in public life. The primary benefits of our research lie in its direct implications for thinking about such contentious issues as the meaning of a 'democratic deficit' within the European Union, about the responsibility of representative regimes to the demands of their electorates, and about the rights of political intervention in states deemed to lack a truly popular sovereign. The various positions underlying each of these controversies are indebted to forms of political thought whose provenance extends back through modern European history into the world of ancient politics. In reconstructing the process whereby the supreme will of the people secured its ascendancy in modern democratic thought, we will be employing interdisciplinary research to develop an innovative account of a major theme in our political and intellectual history.

Popular sovereignty has been a subject of major controversy over the course of its long and complex history. This controversy has persisted into the twenty-first century, impacting on the ways in which we think about state power, public opinion, democratic accountability, and political legitimacy. Our network aims to bring posthumous clarity to the character of past controversies, but our conclusions will have definite implications for the ongoing uses of popular sovereignty in contemporary polemics and debates. Over the longer term, we hope to make an impact internationally with our ideas, but this will be achieved via the application of a more immediate national strategy for engaging the wider public. That strategy will be delivered by means of three mechanisms identified in the Pathways to Impact document attached to this application. Those mechanisms involve journalistic dissemination, public-policy oriented conferences, and a public event to mark the publication of our planned edited volume on popular sovereignty. By these means, we will be able to engage the attention of a variety of identifiable audiences. First, our work will be relevant to a section of public opinion interested in the intellectual issues connected with the idea of popular sovereignty. Next, it will be of interest to opinion formers in the media concerned to think through the implications of our conclusions for contemporary politics. Finally, our work will be relevant to policy oriented bodies and politicians already committed to thinking the issues of popular sovereignty through in connection with pressing issues of contemporary concern.

It is these pressing issues that will act as our surest means to bring about impact. Here we have in mind issues that relate at once to national political culture and to international affairs. Regarding national politics, we aim to reorient thinking on the nature of public accountability by stimulating debate about the nature of the relationship between government authority and public opinion in regimes, such as Britain, that justify political action by resort to the idea of popular sovereignty. Regarding international affairs, our ambition is to intervene into two key debates affecting vital policy issues. These are, first, the question of popular accountability within large reforming federations such as the European Union and, secondly, the problem of intervention into foreign regimes which claim for themselves the legitimacy conferred by the principle of national sovereignty. This issue emerged relatively recently in relation to justifications for the Iraq War, but it is relevant again in even more complex ways in connection with developments in Egypt.

By casting these issues in a new light as a result of original perspectives developed by the research network, our work will help re-orientate discussion and enrich the national culture. By this we do not mean that we intend to somehow educate the public, but rather we aim to contribute a new strand to existing debates and thus modify entrenched arguments. Our purpose is to create opportunities for transcending dogmatic assumptions and positions by introducing new insights and fresh opportunities for justifying alternative approaches to issues of grave public concern. This can only be of benefit to the public welfare at large. In helping in this way to re-cast the national debate, our hope is that a new kind of discussion within Britain will impact upon international opinion. The timescale for international dissemination beyond the academic community is hard to ascertain, but we expect to impact on the national debate over the course of the year after research within the network has been completed. In modifying public perception in this way, we think it is reasonable to expect our intervention into the discussion that surrounds the issues outlined above to make a durable impact.