It is nearly ten years since Quebec held its referendum on Sovereignty Association and time, perhaps, for a retrospective. There were winners and losers in 1980, but the real winner may have been the idea that sovereignty may be established democratically. Governments, of course, are quick to agree that people have the right to determine their sovereignty democratically—so long as this takes place in the State of Nature invented by Hobbes for just such august occasions. Only thrice to my knowledge, however, have governments actually allowed anything even remotely close to a social contract, once in Norway in 1905, once in Wales in 1979 and again in Quebec in 1980.