Questions that keep popping up when populism is the subject of discussion or analysis regularly have to do with “the people,” since populists always refer to the people as the ultimate source of legitimacy, authority and rightful rule. What then is the people, how does it manifest itself, what are its relations to sovereignty, nation, democracy, constitutionalism and “the masses,” and how should we understand the concept of popular sovereignty, which everybody seems to support but which nevertheless constantly gives rise to disagreements, debate, worry and differing— sometimes even mutually exclusive— interpretations?

Many enlightened and well- informed efforts have been made to get to grips with these issues (among them Kalyvas 2005; Laski [1919] 2008; Loughlin and Walker 2007; Marchart 2005; Morgan 1988; Morris 2000; Ochoa Espejo 2011; Spång 2014), but in recent times most notably by Margaret Canovan, who in her The People (2005) makes a valiant effort to ask many of the right questions and to answer them extensively and succinctly, both conceptually and with a view to the historical intricacies of the notion in a variety of nation- states and from the vantage point of different academic disciplines (history, politics, philosophy, discourse theory, linguistics, etc.). She is herself steeped in the Anglo- American tradition and makes no bones about it (see notably Chapter 5), but is also able to include the views of both German and French intellectuals and some Latin and South American approaches to boot.

Canovan is mainly concerned with unveiling the ambiguities and confusions surrounding the concepts of “the people” and “popular sovereignty,” both synchronically and diachronically. Is “the people” a collective unity or just a mass of individuals; abstract or concrete; sovereign nation or sovereign “in reserve”; constituent or constituted; dignified or “rabble”? These are some of the problems that pervade her account throughout, exemplified well in the following quote: