¹ ‘It’s “the people” that happened’, a statement by the Serbian poet Milovan Vitezović at a mass meeting organized by supporters of Slobodan Milošević’s ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’. Vitezović implicitly responded to allegations that the popular happenings that toppled the regional leaderships of Vojvodina and Montenegro in the fall of 1988, were orchestrated by Milošević.

² ‘We are the people’, the slogan chanted at anti-regime demonstrations in Leipzig, German Democratic Republic, on 2 October 1989.

³ ‘We are one people’, the transfiguration of the slogan ‘we are the people’, widely popularized in Western Germany as the putative East German plea for national unification, but which initially began as a plea on the part of the civil society groups in Leipzig on 9 October 1989, with the aim of inviting the members of the security forces to see themselves as members of same people as the protesters, and thus renounce violence. Vanessa Fischer, ‘‘‘Wir sind ein Volk’’: Die Geschichte eines deutschen Rufes’ <http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/wir-sind-ein-volk.1001.de.html?dram:article_id=155887>.

⁴ ‘The people wants to topple the regime’, the slogan used during the Arab Spring in 2011, which, for some analysts like Uriel Abulof, signified the question, ‘What is the Arab Third Estate?’, The Huffington Post <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/uriel-abulof/what-is-the-arab-third-es_b_832628.html>. For Abulof, ‘the people ( sha'ab) was born – a collective, rather than a collection, of individuals, a whole greater than the sum of its parts’.

⁵ ‘When the people are an unconquered power, the government is no longer a power.’: statement by the Ukrainian pop star Ruslana, in her blog post, ‘Very concerned about what is happening, and even more so as it happens!’ <http://blogs.pravda.com.ua/authors/ruslana/52d0acdc26f07/>.

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²¹ See (n 17) 134.

²² Ibid. This ‘seeking to unite’, I hasten to add, should not be interpreted as evidence of the contractual nature of the Nation. Rather, arguing with Paul W Kahn, we should see it as an expression of political eros, ‘that links us to the polity and to each other’. Kahn, PW, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005) 287.Google Scholar

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³² J Locke, Second Treatise of Government, (Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, IN, 1980) section 223, 113. The same assumption reverberates, for example, in the American Declaration of Independence (1776). Echoing Locke, the signatories maintained that ‘mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed’. It is only after ‘long train of abuses and usurpations’ and only after ‘patient sufferance’ that they have undertook the revolution. For a similar rhetorical juxtaposition of ‘patient sufferance’ and justified exhaustion in contemporary Egypt see Khaled Fahmy, ‘We did not risk our lives simply to change the players’, CNN, 3 July 2013, <http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/03/opinion/egypt-morsy-khaled-fahmy/>.

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³⁴ See (n 27).

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⁴⁶ Ibid 171.

⁴⁷ Ibid 194.

⁴⁸ Ibid 178.

⁴⁹ Ibid 192.

⁵⁰ Ibid 157.

⁵¹ See (n 9) 227.

⁵² Loughlin for example writes about constituent power in the context of a right ‘to make and re-make the institutional arrangements through which they are governed’ (emphasis mine). See (n 19) 219.

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⁸² An Allegory of the Revolution with a Portrait Medallion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Nicolas Henri Jeaurat de Bertry, painted at the end of the Reign of Terror in 1794, also features on the front page of the Penguin Classics’ edition of Rousseau’s Social Contract (trans., by M Cranston) (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968).

⁸³ See (n 19) 234 (emphasis mine). For a similar, if a bit more elegiac de-subjectivizing account of pouvoir constituant as a placeholder for our increasingly unrealistic hopes of collective self-government see N Krisch, ‘Pouvoir Constituant and Pouvoir Irritant in the Postnational Order’ (28 April 2014) <http://ssrn.com/abstract=2430128>.

⁸⁴ See (n 66) 17.

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