I

At a key moment in his influential essay on popular sovereignty, Harold Laski writes:

Laski was writing just after the conclusion of World War I, waged, according to Woodrow Wilson, in order to make the world “safe for democracy.” It would of course not be long before democracy would once again require not only philosophical but also military defense, a situation that persisted, in the form of the Cold War, through to the end of the 1980s.Footnote ² As that period was coming to an end, a prevalent view among many Western democratic theorists was that much of the world was indeed finally being made safe for democracy – liberal democracy in particular. So promising was the situation that it seemed reasonable to some to speculate about whether history had come to its end, with liberal democracy becoming “the final form of human government.”Footnote ³ When the Journal of Democracy was founded in 1990, its editors announced that it would be dedicated to unifying “what is becoming a worldwide democratic movement” now that democracy had been “rescued and restored to its true countenance.”Footnote ⁴

In actuality, the geopolitical history of the subsequent thirty years has been far more tumultuous than many had anticipated, and, as suggested in the introduction to this volume, Western-style liberal democracy now seems far less triumphant, and far more in need of justification, than many had foreseen. In the past three decades, much has also transpired in Plato scholarship, and this presents an opportunity. We may be at a good moment to revisit Laski’s intuition that thinking in fundamental terms about popular sovereignty in some sense goes back, or should go back, to Plato. In other words, if the contemporary crises of liberal democracies have necessitated a fundamental rethinking of democratic theory, we may be aided in that task by the renaissance that has occurred in recent decades in the study of Plato, one of the first and most influential writers on democracy.

That at least is my proposal in this chapter. I shall be focusing in particular on Plato’s Republic and the exploration of the relationship between knowledge and political rule in that dialogue. Laski’s view that in the Republic Plato articulates his “uncompromising rejection” of democratic rule is widespread. On this view, Plato is said to ground his rejection in the thesis that in a well-governed regime, knowledge and political power will coincide. In democracies, by contrast, power will be divorced from knowledge because “general public opinion,” which in principle holds sway in a democracy, will be deficient with regard to knowledge. If we grant, as Tocqueville once suggested, that democracy is the “practical realization” of popular sovereignty, Plato’s position on democracy would, according to this common reading, amount to an unambiguous denial of the legitimacy of popular sovereignty.Footnote ⁵ By contrast, I will be maintaining that it is neither interpretatively sound nor particularly illuminating to read the Republic as Plato’s epistocratic manifesto, in which he delegitimizes popular rule in the course of advocating for the coronation of philosophers.Footnote ⁶ As I hope to show, the Republic counsels humility with regard to the place of knowledge in politics, and offers ways to think about political legitimacy in the absence of justificatory knowledge or expertise. More generally, I maintain that the dialogue is best understood as providing a matrix for reflecting on fundamental political questions. What comes to light about democracy in the conversation recounted in the Republic is not the illegitimacy of popular sovereignty but rather the centrality of persuasion, the legitimizing power of consent, and the specific character of its myths and educational ideals. In the first part of this chapter, I lay out in more detail what Laski refers to as the “most real problem of modern politics.” The central section offers a close reading of the most relevant aspects of the Republic and defends the approach I have adumbrated. I close with some remarks on how this reading of Plato may inform our thinking about the contemporary practice and eventual fate of popular self-rule.

Laski’s “most real problem” is perhaps best understood as the problem of political legitimacy. We may begin by distinguishing between two conceptions of political legitimacy. In one sense, popular sovereignty encapsulates the belief that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is the sense in which, as Charles Taylor has put it, popular sovereignty is “the regnant legitimacy idea of our time.”Footnote ⁷ Virtually all contemporary political regimes in one way or another ground their legitimacy on the claim that they have a mandate from the people. Understood this way, insofar as the people consent, the regime may be considered to be legitimate. While it is true, as Laski points out, that there is a fictive character to popular rule in large modern states, since they invariably rely on some form of representation, still the whole panoply of democratic institutions – central to which, of course, is the franchise – is, in theory at least, designed to ensure that governments are ultimately accountable to the people. To simplify, a government is legitimate, in this sense, to the extent that those institutions are working properly.

If the first sense of legitimacy pertains to the question of whether or not, in any given state, the people do rule, the second pertains to the question of whether or not the people should rule: “why are ‘the people’ the ultimate political authority?”Footnote ⁸ A “philosophic justification of democratic government” would be, effectively, an answer to that question. It would entail giving a reasoned account of why the people should rule. Such a philosophic justification would, according to Laski, have to begin with a refutation of what he claims is Plato’s denial of the value of public opinion. As will become clear in what follows, I have reservations about what Laski imputes to Plato, but I do follow his suggestion that theoretical speculation on democratic legitimacy can be traced back to Plato, and, as I aim to show, I believe that the discussion of legitimacy in the Republic will be illuminating for our consideration of some of the “real problems” of modern politics. As I have already intimated, it is in particular the emphasis in the Republic on the status of knowledge – its presence and its absence – with regard to both the evaluation and the execution of political rule that I wish to bring to bear on the question of the legitimacy of popular sovereignty and on the prospects for its practical realization in modern democratic states.

Before turning to a closer consideration of Plato, it will be helpful to exhibit more clearly how the status of knowledge emerges as a problem when thinking about the legitimacy of popular sovereignty, and to point up the ongoing vitality of this problem in modern and contemporary political theory. As Laski presents it, “general public opinion” is implicitly contrasted with what we may call “expert knowledge.” Plato is said to deny value to the mere opinions of the general public, which in turn delegitimizes the people’s claim on power, and to assert as legitimate the power of the few who have, or the one who has, the relevant and valuable knowledge. Two aspects of this may be distinguished. The first pertains to the question of whether, and if so to what degree, it is possible within a democracy to set up institutions that bring relevant knowledge to bear on political decision-making while respecting the principle of popular self-rule. This question was at the heart of the early twentieth-century debate between Walter Lippman and John Dewey. Lippman denigrated as “mystical” the belief that “the compounding of individual ignorance in masses of people can produce a continuous directing force in public affairs,” while Dewey maintained that with appropriate education and channels of open communication, an informed public capable of reasoned self-governance could be achieved.Footnote ⁹

The central issue debated by Lippman and Dewey nearly a century ago is identified by the authors of a recent Knight Foundation study as “one of the oldest, hardest questions of political philosophy,” namely, “how to ensure that political decisions are grounded in sound knowledge and sound judgment.”Footnote ¹⁰ The authors of that study present a set of ideals and practices that, they argue, help to ensure the cultivation of “democratic knowledge” and its adoption and deployment for achieving collective ends. Josiah Ober likewise confronts this question in his 2017 book Demopolis. Explicitly echoing Plato’s Republic, Ober endeavors to construct a city in speech that embodies all the features of what he calls “basic democracy” without incorporating principles typically associated with liberalism. As Ober sees it, an “epistemic democracy” would “bring domain-specific expertise into the process of decision making without ceding political authority to experts or autocrats.”Footnote ¹¹ To this end, he proposes reliance on a procedure known as “relevant expertise aggregation.” These theorists, and many others, are grappling with the first aspect of the problem we have identified and suggesting actual and potential institutions and practices that would put relevant knowledge in the service of democratic governance.

There is, however, a more radical aspect to the problem. It pertains to the kind of knowledge that would be necessary to make reasoned judgments about foundational principles, including and particularly the principle of popular sovereignty – in other words, the knowledge that would be required to make an informed judgment about the question of whether the people should rule. We see this question arise, for example, in contemporary debates about epistocracy, or “the rule of the knowledgeable.”Footnote ¹² Speaking generally, advocates of epistocracy question, or even outright deny, the legitimacy of the claim that the people should rule. They hold that power should be “formally distributed according to competence, skill, and the good faith to act on that skill,” and that those virtues are not distributed perfectly equally among all people, nor do they inhere in the people, taken collectively, in any relevant sense.Footnote ¹³ On this view, the optimal political arrangement would distribute power among individuals in proportion to the (uneven) distribution of relevant knowledge. In these discussions, Plato is typically cited as a precedent and proponent of epistocracy.Footnote ¹⁴

Defenders of democracy, particularly those concerned to rebut epistemic challenges, have often regarded Plato as an enemy of the cause. We have seen that Laski invokes Plato as the arch antidemocratic, whose “uncompromising rejection of the democratic system” must be refuted if there is to be a philosophical justification for democratic government. This view of Plato was widespread in the twentieth century, propounded most vehemently by Karl Popper. Popper portrays Plato as an enemy of the “open society” and argues that Plato’s “poisonous writing” turns his readers against democracy.Footnote ¹⁵ For both Laski and Popper, and many others, Plato is an advocate of what Popper calls “sophocracy,” or “the rule of learnedness”: “the ruler of Plato’s state should be a possessor of knowledge, a ‘fully qualified philosopher.’”Footnote ¹⁶ Plato is said to denigrate democracy because it entrusts political power to those who do not posses knowledge. The source of his mistake is said to be his tacit belief that “political power is ‘essentially’ unchecked,” which is to say, “sovereign.” Once that belief is in place, the only important question is “Who is to be the sovereign?,” and this leads virtually inevitably, as Popper sees it, to the conclusion that philosophers should be kings. In positing that “the fundamental problem of politics” is expressed in the question “Who shall rule the state?”, Plato “created a lasting confusion in political philosophy.”Footnote ¹⁷

Popper’s focus on the question “Who shall rule the state?” obscures a prior and more fundamental question about the availability of knowledge, not only the practical knowledge of how to govern but also the theoretical knowledge that one would have to have in order to answer the question “Who shall rule?”. This prior question, I maintain, is the deeper concern in the Republic. To anticipate what is to come, I shall be arguing that the Republic, on its own terms, cannot be positing that philosophers should rule, and that the dialogue gives no assurance that the knowledge that would be necessary to conclude that philosophers should rule is available to humans. Even if it were to be, it is not clear as a practical matter how its attainment could be facilitated, and it remains ex hypothesi unascertainable whether or not any person who would have such knowledge, the genuine philosopher, would decide in favor of epistocracy. This argument emerges from a close reading of Plato’s text, informed by interpretative approaches that have been developed and refined in the years since Popper’s book appeared. It is to this that we now turn.

II

In the past three decades, scholars have increasingly acknowledged that Plato’s use of the dialogue form introduces ineluctable doubt regarding whether a statement of any given speaker, or even a point agreed upon by more than one speaker, can be ascribed to the text as a whole or to its author. Nevertheless, many commentators persist in ascribing to Plato beliefs and convictions that are espoused by one or another of his characters, and often enough, views that are not even claimed by any character, but are merely proposed for consideration or that occur within the formulation of a question. To discuss this matter in detail would take us far afield, so for present purposes I shall simply advert to a pivotal essay by Michael Frede that makes the essential point succinctly:

While I do not pursue here in any depth the ramifications of this hermeneutical principle, accepting it, as I think one should, already casts doubt on the view that the Republic should be read in any straightforward way as a defense on Plato’s part of epistocracy.

The most frequently cited textual evidence for the claim that Plato believes that philosophers should rule comes in Book Five, where Socrates recounts his contention that:

We may note first that the remark is attributed by Socrates to himself, in the context of recounting (to whom, we aren’t told) a conversation he had had the day before. It is the fate of this claim within the conceit of the dialogue that concerns us. Socrates and his interlocutors have agreed to “make a city in speech” (369c), a city that is “perfectly good” (427e). It is in the context of considering how such a city “in speech” may come to be in deed – how the theory, as it were, could be put into practice – that Socrates moots the idea of a sophocracy or epistocracy. When Adeimantus subsequently challenges Socrates with the hypothetical objection that philosophers are either vicious or useless (487b–d), and so couldn’t possibly be the rulers of the city that would be “perfectly good,” Socrates explains that the objector in this case would have in mind pretenders to philosophy, not true philosophers. The philosophers to whom he is referring when he proposes that philosophers should rule are “lovers of the sight of truth” who have their “understanding truly turned toward the things that are” and have “no leisure to look down toward the affairs of human beings” (500b–c). Already we see here the intimation of a practical problem, for if the philosophers are not concerned with the affairs of human beings, it is hard to imagine how they could conceivably govern human beings. The problem becomes more explicit later in the dialogue, a point to which I shall return.

The first major difficulty, however, arises immediately after Socrates and Adeimantus have reaffirmed their agreement that the city they have founded in speech is best in theory and that, though exceedingly difficult, it is not impossible for it to come into being in deed, that is, to be realized in the spatiotemporal world. Socrates at that point says that they next must discuss, “in what way and as a result of what studies and practices the saviors will take their place within our regime” (502d). Several important things become clear in the ensuing discussion of the education of the philosopher-guardians that unfolds at the end of Book Six and into Book Seven. First, what ultimately legitimates the claim to political power on behalf of philosophers is the knowledge of what Socrates calls “the idea of the good.” Without knowledge of this highest object of study, all other knowledge claims are just opinions, the accuracy of which is uncertain. This of course would include any claims about the political good, common good, collective ends, and so on. As Socrates puts it, “if we don’t know it [the idea of the good] and should have ever so much knowledge of the rest without this, you know that it’s no profit to us …” (505a) and “no one will adequately know the just and fair things themselves before this is known” (506a).

On Socrates’ own account, then, in order to qualify as true philosophers in the relevant sense, in the sense that would legitimate political authority, the persons in question would need to have access to this knowledge, and they would need to be able to grasp with their minds the idea of the good (see 505e–506a). Moreover, since the idea of the good is the grounding of all secure knowledge – it is “the cause of knowledge and truth” (508e) – only a true philosopher, only one who knows the idea of the good, would be capable of answering the question “should philosophers rule?” or, more generally the question, “who should rule?” Equally importantly, Socrates responds to his interlocutors’ entreaties by saying that his own opinions about the idea of the good are “out of the range of our present thrust“(506e). It is noteworthy that he refers to his “opinions about,” not his “knowledge of,” this idea, and that he had just prior to this said, “we don’t have sufficient knowledge” of the idea of the good (505a). Nowhere in the remaining books does Socrates reverse himself on this question. It seems abundantly clear, in other words, that neither Socrates nor anyone else claims that the founders of the city in speech – Socrates included – possess knowledge of the good; in fact, it is suggested that at best, Socrates may have some “opinions” about it. We are compelled to conclude that, on the very terms agreed on by the interlocutors, they are in no position to know whether philosophers should rule.

Even if we set aside these qualifications, doubt persists about the availability to humans of the knowledge that is said to be required to legitimate epistocracy, and about the practicality of facilitating the education that would be necessary to acquire it. I shall briefly mention three reasons for doubt. First, when Socrates introduces the idea of the good, employing the analogy of the sun, he observes that “not only being known is present in the things known as a consequence of the good, but also “existence and being” are present as a consequence of it. The good, he emphasizes, “isn’t being, but is still beyond being” (509b). It is a deeply enigmatic passage, but one may at least acknowledge that it is not at all obvious what it would mean to “know” something that is “beyond being.” Second, Socrates makes clear that the obligation of the philosophers to serve as rulers pertains only to philosophers who have been reared in and educated by a “perfectly good” city. Those who come to be in other cities would be free to pursue philosophy undisturbed, with no obligation to rule, and the suggestion is that they would in fact chose to do so (520a–b). As a practical matter, then, for an epistocracy ever to come into being, it would, paradoxically, require the preexistence of an epistocracy. Socrates highlights this conundrum when he observes that, if somehow philosophers were to come to power in an imperfect city, and were to want to sustain their rule, they would have to resort to extreme measures: “all those in the city who happen to be older than ten they will send out to the country; and taking over their children, they will rear them … in their own manners and law” (540a–41e). Finally, we may note that the image of the cave in Book Seven puts a sharp point on the doubts we have raised. When Glaucon says, “it’s a strange image … and strange prisoners you’re telling of,” Socrates responds by saying, “they’re like us” (515a), indicating that he and his interlocutors dwell in the realm of shadowy opinion, without access to the knowledge that is represented metaphorically as the world outside the cave. They may well conclude – indeed they already have so concluded, earlier in the conversation – that the perfectly good city is the one ruled by philosophers, but their opinion on this is itself not grounded in secure knowledge. If we accept the terms of the image, there is no reason given to suppose that what Socrates and his interlocutors opine that a philosopher should do will necessarily correspond to what a true philosopher knows he should do. We noted earlier a curious moment in which Socrates observes that philosophers have “no leisure to look down toward the affairs of human beings” (500b–c). The difficulty hinted at there is made explicit later, when Socrates indicates that it will be the job of the founders of the perfectly good city to “compel” philosophers to take up the mantle of rulership, even if they would prefer to stay out of politics and to spend their time philosophizing. Socrates suggests that the founders will not thereby be committing an injustice against the philosophers, but given what we have just reviewed, it is patently clear that in any dispute between the philosophers and the founders, the former would have to be in the right. There is, in other words, no way for the founders to know that the philosopher would turn out to be an epistocrat and would agree with them that he should rule.Footnote ²⁰

It seems now sufficiently clear that there is little textual support for the view that the Republic is a sophocratic or epistocratic manifesto. Far from purporting to offer a conclusive argument for “the rule of learnedness,” the dialogue proposes that the knowledge that would be necessary to provide an authoritative answer to the question, “who should rule?,” is at best exceedingly difficult to attain, and perhaps simply inaccessible to human beings. It is Thrasymachus, after all, not Socrates (let alone Plato) who introduces the notion that there could be a precise science (epistêmê) of rule (340e). Socrates, for his part, draws a sharp distinction between the founders of the city in speech – himself, Glaucon, and Adeimantus – who have only uncertain opinions about the matters they discuss, and the would-be philosopher-kings, who would by definition have secure knowledge about such things. What is most significant for present concerns is to recognize that the difference in the status of knowledge in these two disparate worlds is reflected in the political organization of each. In the hypothetical city in speech epistocracy is legitimate because the hypothesis itself stipulates that a knowledge-based authoritative answer to the question about who should rule is available. Indeed, in such a city, epistocracy would be the only legitimate regime. For the founders, however, who lack this knowledge – at the very least, there is no suggestion that any of them possesses it – a genuine epistocracy would be impossible, and any claim to power made on epistocratic principles would be illegitimate. To speak precisely, it would be tyrannical. The founders – Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus – form among themselves a discursive community, directed toward a shared goal, and operating on a principle of consent. If in the city in speech precise knowledge (epistêmê) underwrites legitimacy, in the community of the founders, by contrast, legitimacy derives from agreement. Recognizing the distinction between the community of interlocutors and the citizenry of the city in speech in turn serves as a reminder that the participants in this dialogue are citizens of a democracy – Athens – who have limited knowledge, differing capacities, individual proclivities, and at times divergent views, and who are engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about political things. They in other words, and not the hypothetical citizens of the city in speech, are most “like us.”

III

In the balance of this chapter, I shall consider, in a more speculative mode, some ways in which the Republic, understood along the lines I have suggested, may inform our thinking about the principle of popular sovereignty and the prospects for its actualization in contemporary democracies. Perhaps most interesting here is the question with which we began, Laski’s concern about the justification or legitimacy of what Tocqueville refers to as the “dogma” of popular sovereignty.Footnote ²¹ As discussed above, one may usefully distinguish between the questions “do the people rule?” and “should the people rule?” It is with regard to the latter question, I want to suggest, that the Republic provides a useful matrix for thought. Those who read the Republic as a defense of epistocracy conclude that the dialogue answers the second question unambiguously in the negative: not the people but those with knowledge should rule.Footnote ²² The problem, as we have seen, is that no one in the dialogue – and this includes Socrates – is portrayed as having the requisite knowledge to reach that conclusion with certainty. What, then, does the dialogue have to offer us in our own considerations of political matters, generally, and popular sovereignty, in particular?

A text that may legitimately be considered “a possession for all time,” as Thucydides described his aspiration for his own work, exists not outside of time, but within it. It belongs, so to speak, to the times, which are perpetually changing, even if in some important sense the text itself does not change. The vitality of interpretation emerges from the interaction between the fixed text and its ever-changing interpreters. Only through fidelity to the former can its meaning emerge, even if what it means at any given time, to any given community of readers, depends also on the way it is received.Footnote ²³ In my view, the Republic does provide resources for a defense of the desirability of democracy, but this does not necessarily make Plato a defender of democracy. If we consider the Republic as a kind of thought experiment, Plato may best be regarded as a critical spectator, a deliberate provocateur, and a thoughtful interlocutor.Footnote ²⁴

To be sure, philosopher-kingship is never portrayed in the Republic as impossible or undesirable. Socrates seems committed to holding open the possibility that true philosophers can come to be, even in imperfect regimes, and he insists that, however unlikely, it is not impossible for a true philosopher to attain power. Although we have seen that the interlocutors are not qualified to say whether such a regime would be best, that possibility is certainly not foreclosed. However, in the absence of genuine knowledge of the good, we are left with competing answers to the question, “who should rule?,” and with diverse and differing accounts of the political good. Under such conditions, a tolerant and plural democracy may well be regarded as the least bad option. Moreover, what Socrates identifies as the chief characteristics of democracy – freedom and equality – may in this light be regarded as virtues. If genuine knowledge is unattainable, or at least at present unattained, it may well be that the best option is a regime in which competing claims about the political good are, to the extent possible and certainly for the purposes of argument, treated equally, and adherents to each view are free to pursue the way of life dictated by their understanding of the good and to advocate in public debate for its desirability. As noted above, within the conceit of the Republic, these are the conditions that obtain not for the hypothetical citizens of the city in speech, but for the interlocutors. Recall that at the start of the dialogue Socrates recounts how Polemarchus (presumably playfully) insists that Socrates and Glaucon must “either prove stronger than these men or stay here,” to which Socrates responds, “ ‘Isn’t there still one other possibility …,’ I said, ‘our persuading you that you must let us go?’ ” A brief debate ensues, which concludes with Socrates declaring, in the language of the Athenian assembly, “if it is so resolved, that is how we must act.”Footnote ²⁵ This opening scene sets the tone: the interlocutors constitute a rudimentary democracy. Here debate and persuasion replace violence and physical compulsion, and authority is established through consent.

Democracy is, as Socrates says, “probably the fairest [or, “most beautiful”] of the regimes,” and while there is surely some irony in this remark, it is often the case in Plato’s dialogues that an ironic remark is not merely an assertion of the opposite of what is actually said, but rather a signal that the matter at hand calls for further reflection. Socrates also says at this point that in a democracy especially, “all sorts of human beings come to be” and that it is “a convenient place to look for a regime.” If there is beauty in democracy, it may in part consist in this diversity, and in the fact that it is welcoming to people like Socrates and his interlocutors – and perhaps, people “like us” – who wish to compare different options as they reflect on forms of government and consider how to realize their aspirations (557c–d).

If democracy is, in this sense at least, presented as desirable in the Republic, it is also shown to be unstable and precarious. Moreover, a sharp irony of Socrates’ account is that precisely those characteristics – freedom and equality – that make democracy well suited to circumstances in which philosophical knowledge is absent or relatively inaccessible, are also liabilities, and make a democratic regime particularly vulnerable to the rise of tyranny. As Socrates tells it, the democratic populace becomes so enamored of freedom that any constraint implemented by responsible leaders is felt as oppression, and so favor falls on “rulers who are like the ruled” (562d). Eventually, acting on their devotion to freedom and equality, the citizens end up “paying no attention to the laws, written or unwritten, in order that they may avoid having any master at all” (563d). The core democratic virtues are destabilizing in another sense as well. Absent an authoritative account of the political good, competing opinions about the good enjoy, as it were, political equality – no one belief is officially favored over another – and citizens are free to believe what they wish. This plurality of values, Socrates suggests, makes the populace more susceptible to manipulation by a demagogue, who can exacerbate factionalism for his own ends. By appealing to the interests of individual classes or groups, these factions come into conflict with one another. Each faction’s claim on equality and assertion of freedom comes at the expense of the city’s collective commitment to those values – and so, as Socrates says, “the greatest and most savage slavery” proceeds from “the extreme of freedom” (564a).

Perhaps most significant for our concerns, the argument of the Republic helps us to discern and articulate a certain paradox in the principle of popular sovereignty. The underlying question here is whether the right to rule can be established on the basis of reason and knowledge rather than on the basis of coercive force. We see that, in a plural democracy with a diversity of views about the political good, there are competing claimants to the right to rule. As Socrates presents them, this includes the wisest, the most honorable, the most wealthy, and the people as a whole. If this fundamental political question – the very question of legitimacy – can in fact be adjudicated on the basis of reason and knowledge, then it would seem that the ultimate power, or sovereignty, would rightfully belong to the one who knows. In that case, it would be the wise, and not the people, who should rule. If, on the other hand, the would-be adjudicator is not in possession of such knowledge – as is true in the case of the founders in the Republic – it seems the power to resolve competing claims will lie with the people, but it must also be acknowledged that in such a scenario power is not legitimated on the basis of reason and knowledge.

On what basis, then, if any, is popular self-rule and the principle of consent legitimated? To cite Canovan again, “why are ‘the people’ the ultimate political authority?”Footnote ²⁶ The discussion of the noble lie in the Republic may provide an approach to this question (414b–15d). While a detailed analysis cannot be conducted here, we may make a few observations. First, Socrates indicates that such lies – one might also call them myths – come into being “in case of need.” Socrates shows why his city-in-speech requires such a myth, but we may ask whether modern democracies are also in need of such myths, and if so, why.Footnote ²⁷ Second, Socrates notes that his lie would “persuade, in the best case, even the rulers, but if not them, then the rest of the city.” In a regime of popular self-government, if legitimating myths are required, who would need to believe in them? And who, if anyone, could be exempt from such belief? Finally, Socrates concocts a myth that accounts for both the heterogeneity or stratification and the unity of the city in speech, and that unity, based on autochthony, asserts both familial bonds and geographical boundaries. Do the “stories of peoplehood” in modern democracies require similar features? These questions lay out a field of inquiry that can and should be approached in a variety of ways, employing theoretical and empirical methods drawn from a range of disciplines. Some examples may be found in subsequent chapters of this volume.Footnote ²⁸

If, as suggested above, the Republic is best regarded in this connection as providing neither an attack on democracy nor a defense of it, but rather a matrix for thinking about the principle of popular rule (as well as other principles of political organization), it may be particularly valuable for the light it sheds on debates between democracy’s critics and its defenders. Consider again the epistocratic critique of democracy, as for example proposed by Jason Brennan. “I contend that the choice between democracy and epistocracy,” writes Brennan, “is instrumental. It ultimately comes down to which system would perform better in the real world.”Footnote ²⁹ Brennan argues that although “we do not yet have sufficient evidence to definitely favor epistocracy over democracy, … there are … good grounds to presume that some feasible form of epistocracy would in fact outperform democracy”(16). He makes clear that he is not advocating for anything like a “philosopher king or guardian class,”(14) and rejects the idea that the case for the superiority of epistocracy rests on the claim that “when some citizens have greater knowledge or reliability, this justifies granting them political authority over those with lesser knowledge” (17). His more modest claim is that, “when some citizens are morally unreasonable, ignorant, or incompetent about politics, this justifies not permitting them to exercise political authority over others” (18). Yet, the question raised by the Republic is not so easily avoided, for the simple reason that, even accepting Brennan’s caveats, the “performance” of regimes and the morality, wisdom, and competence of potential officeholders would still need to be evaluated, and the authority of the person or body of persons making those evaluations would still need to be legitimated. If that legitimacy is based on a claim to knowledge about the political good, then that claim in turn must be defended. As my discussion above has sought to show, the Republic makes clear what such a defense would entail, and it casts profound doubt on whether it could be successful. If, on the other hand, the instrumental defense of epistocracy does not rely on some knowledge claim to ground the legitimacy of judgments about the performance of the government or the fitness of its officeholders, then it is hard to see how anything other than the popular will could conceivably legitimate such judgments. Such an outcome would hardly constitute an argument “against democracy,” but rather a tacit endorsement of it, and in that case, one would again be confronted with the fundamental questions raised in the Republic about democracy in comparison with other types of regimes.

By way of counterexample, we may consider the contemporary defense of democracy put forward by Josiah Ober in Demopolis. Ober rejects the epistocratic claim that the legitimacy of political power is grounded in knowledge. “Epistocracy goes wrong,” he writes, “because it wrongly supposes that, because there are experts in domains relevant to politics, there are also general experts in politics” (145). No one, in Ober’s view, has or could have the knowledge that would be necessary to legitimize the right to rule. Ober is deliberately minimalist in his defense of democracy. To that end, he separates out democracy from liberalism, arguing that his aim is to defend the former, what he calls “basic democracy,” which in his view could be compatible with either liberalism or illiberalism: “My hope is to show that democracy in and of itself effectively promotes various desirable conditions of existence, and that it does so quite independently of liberalism or any other theory of moral value” (xiv). Yet, it remains unclear how conditions may be determined to be desirable, or undesirable, without some account to moral value. To ensure that citizens of the Demopolis – Ober’s name for the hypothetical city he envisions – will be committed to democracy, Ober proposes a regime of civic education that inculcates devotion to “democratic goods,” among them “the free exercise of constitutive human capacities, political freedom, political equality, and civic dignity” (74). The preeminence of these values, it must be noted, are not up for debate in Demopolis, nor is it up to the demos to determine what values belong on the list. Moreover, no argument is put forth in support of any individual or group of individuals having the requisite knowledge to adjudicate such questions, for, as noted, there are no “general experts in politics.” It seems, in other words, that the most difficult questions raised in the Republic about the relationship between knowledge and political authority are not addressed in this account. Here we may recall, and slightly repurpose, Laski’s contention that “the philosophic justification of democracy” must begin with, or at least at some point ought eventually to confront, the challenge articulated in Plato’s dialogue.

I close with some remarks on education in relation to popular self-rule. It is of course no accident that a foundational work of political philosophy would be so centrally concerned with education. Not only is a large portion of the conversation recounted in the Republic explicitly dedicated to the topic – a long stretch of Books Two and Three and all of Book Seven – but the drama of the dialogue itself turns on the enactment of education, with Socrates as teacher and Glaucon and Adeimantus as his pupils. Moreover, it is acknowledged that both subjects and rulers are prepared for their roles in the political life of the community through education, and this is true as much in regimes of popular self-rule, where subject and ruler are in principle one and the same, as it is in any other regime.

We have seen that one of the essential characteristics of democratic regimes as presented in the Republic is a diversity of beliefs about what constitutes the good, whether regarded as the “political good” or the “good life.” Indeed, what is recognized as constituting the common good in such regimes is precisely and only those features that sustain the genesis and coexistence of a plurality of differing conceptions of good politics or the good life. Democracy is also characterized as unstable, as perpetually in danger of sliding into tyranny. Throughout his account of the decline of regimes, Socrates emphasizes the role that is played by the failure on the part of the ruling elite to properly educate the younger generation. In a democratic regime, in particular, the lack of agreement on what ought to be valued – aside from equality and freedom – and hence, on what ought to be taught, is an acute challenge for education.Footnote ³⁰

The Republic is not an educational handbook, but it is both a meditation on the topic and a dramatization of education in action. Perhaps its deepest teaching in this regard is humility. So much about the dialogue, about Plato’s writing in general, and about Plato’s Socrates, points toward the importance of intellectual humility, by which I mean the persistent effort to keep present to mind the limits of one’s knowledge.Footnote ³¹ This cannot help but sound ironic, given the sheer scope and quality of Plato’s corpus, the magnitude of his influence, and the dialectical sophistication of his primary protagonist. Yet, as we have seen, at the heart of the Republic is the absence of knowledge about what matters most – without, it must be noted, any diminishment in the passionate desire to know. The turning points in so many Platonic dialogues are marked by the elenchus and the experience of aporia – meaning that they are moments at which what is not known (what one desires to know) becomes apparent both to the character and to the reader. Socrates, despite all his apparent mastery, is perpetually proclaiming his ignorance.

While the educational program that is envisioned by Socrates and his friends in the course of the Republic is designed to prepare auxiliaries and guardians for their roles in a kingdom ruled by philosophers, the education enacted in the drama of the dialogue occurs between citizens in a democracy, and as such, it may have some exemplary power for us. Certainly in contemporary liberal democracies, in which contestation over what constitutes good politics and a good life can be fierce, cultivating intellectual humility through education, ideally not only of children, might well be beneficial. The depiction of democracy in the Republic and the account given of the threat posed by incipient tyranny, together suggest that while the inherent momentum of the regime is toward ever-greater freedom and equality, the consequence is an ever-diminishing sense of a common good that would promote social cohesion and protect the people against demagogic manipulation and a slide into autocracy. The suggestion for educators of all kinds who find themselves living in democratic states may be that the search for a common good – however long and hard the road, to borrow a Platonic metaphor – ought to be a priority. To speculate in more detail on how that could be done is the task for another occasion, but I submit for consideration that reading the Republic together might not be a bad place to start.

Sovereignty is a multifaceted concept, connecting the question of the extent of authority with the question of in whose name or under whose authorization that power is used. In popular sovereignty, legitimacy is rooted in the consent of the governed; that is, the people are the proper sources of political authority. This power to make a presence felt in the world, recreating the world according to a collective vision of the people, is especially appealing in our era of “inverted totalitarianism,”Footnote ² “devitalized agency,”Footnote ³ and continued outright authoritarianism and oppression – and continues to animate struggles for democracy across the world.

Yet, the question of the extent of that authority is another matter. While the people might be the legitimating force in popular sovereignty, what are they legitimating? In recent years, the idea of sovereignty – long a staple concept for politics – has come under greater scrutiny. Conceived of as ultimate and final authority, some see sovereignty itself as a dangerous aspiration, no matter in whose name it is exercised. For critics, the ideal of sovereign power monopolizes our ideas about agency to the point where we cannot imagine a version of political freedom that is not bound up with the ability to control action – and thereby denying pluralism and tending toward illiberal violence.Footnote ⁴ Thus, a major concern of this volume is the tension between liberal institutions and popular sovereignty – that is, the boundaries of legitimacy. Currently, pathological forms of populism appear to threaten liberal constitutional protections in even the most established democracies. When is sovereignty a necessary and useful fiction – a noble lie as in Bartscherer’s chapter, Chapter 1 – and when does it bleed into gross abuse of power? Or is it just not “sovereignty” when the claims violate particular boundaries, founded in either historical practice or abstract ideals? Even if we were to resolve the troubled problem of the who in popular sovereignty – as the contributions in Part IV examine – the danger of overreach remains. What determines “problematic?” Where is the line between a legitimate ultimate authority and an illegitimate one? Further, even if we acknowledge that these boundaries are highly contextual and subject to contestation – of the sort we see Martin Luther King, Jr. negotiate in Letter from Birmingham Jail – we should also understand the practical, universal boundaries that limit all attempts to hold ultimate authority. Such boundaries do not require arguments about conceptions of justice, but instead relate to basic features of reality.

In this chapter, I look to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, in which the author reveals the ambiguous boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate political authority, even as the text tries to stabilize them. In doing this, Sophocles contributed to a developing discourse around the difference between illegitimate and legitimate forms of power in post-Peloponnesian War Athens and helped to shape the view of both tyranny and sovereignty that we have inherited. I begin by laying out why an exploration of tyranny is so relevant to the study of sovereignty. From there, I examine the discursive history of tyranny in ancient Greece, revealing the political work the term accomplished. From there, I go on to explore exactly what makes Oedipus a tyrant, while also focusing on the real bounds of his seemingly unbounded power – and how that seeming unboundedness in fact contributed to the tragic reversal that must mark all aspirations to ultimate authority.

Family Resemblances: Sovereignty and Tyranny

In both academic and everyday usage, the sovereign is the ultimate authority. Whether the self, the demos, or the state, the sovereign is not accountable to others, as the sovereign legitimately occupies an authority over all others. For Hobbes, political sovereignty is bounded only by the original covenant regarding self-preservation and natural law; for Bodin, only the Christian god is above the sovereign. For these theorists, this human authority must be final in order to do the work of settling conflict and providing stability in the polity. Of course, this is a fiction – the potential for disagreement and conflict remains, no matter how divine-like the authority – but even as a fiction, the finality of sovereign power is seen as a necessary balm to the volatility of communal life. This modern conception was, as other contributors to this volume trace, worked out in the early modern era; the word does not exist in earlier sources. Yet, the idea of ultimate and unassailable authority stretches back much further. In fact, as Kinch Hoekstra has observed, the language used to build this conceptual framework by Bodin and others is strikingly similar to ancient descriptions of tyranny – with both ideals resting on the unaccountability of the ruler:

While many ancient Greek specialists have noted the anachronism of referring to “sovereignty” in Athens, ancient tyranny nonetheless served as an inspiration for early modern conceptualizations of sovereignty. As both sovereignty and tyranny are essentially unaccountable forms of authority, what makes them different from one another? The simple answer is that tyranny is the illegitimate form of authority that, in its legitimate form, is called sovereignty. Yet, two complications arise.

First, tyranny itself was not a stable concept in Athens and gradually changed meaning over time. That is, it was not always considered an inherently illegitimate form of rule; it begins as a term that simply referred to how a ruler came to power. Even later, as it accrued associations with hubristic overreach and moral deviance, tyranny was still sometimes viewed as a laudable aspiration, a sense of freedom that anyone with good sense would crave.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, Victoria Wohl discusses Athenians’ “intense erotic investment” in the tyrant, not merely as an object of hatred but also as an alluring vision of the self.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, tyranny served as a model for Athenian democratic power, with the demos “appropriate[ing] the tyrant’s language and power.”Footnote ⁸ Matt Landauer also links Greek tyranny and democracy through their unaccountability, showing the ways in which advisors, advice giving, and decision-making were more similar than not in the two forms of polity.Footnote ⁹ Yet, by the close of the classical period, tyranny’s freedom comes to be associated with antidemocratic illegitimate boundary transgression, leading to tragic reversal for those who would try to wield such power and we are left with a more familiar, less ambiguous view of the tyrant as a figure of revulsion.

Second, while both sovereignty and tyranny can refer to ultimate and unaccountable authority, this is imprecise. Only the most realpolitik versions of sovereignty would maintain a total absence of outside standards or claim that the sovereign authority can do anything it deems appropriate. Yet, popular sovereignty’s potential for descent into majority tyranny requires tempering institutions and mediating conceptual language. Absolute power is sovereignty when the commenter believes the power to be legitimate, and tyranny when it has overstepped some boundary. Some limit remains, although the practical enforceability is often questionable. In Bodin, for example, how exactly does god ensure absolutist rulers refrain from or repent for acts of murder? Who actually holds Hobbes’s sovereign to account? We see this through to the twentieth century, as liberal institutions and populism come into conflict now. Do the people have the right to do anything they want? Or are they bound by liberal constitutional principles to protect minority rights and civil liberties? Although the sovereign is the final, ultimate authority, most theories in fact put some other ultimate authority over the sovereign. That is, there is something else that renders this enormous power acceptable and legitimate in a way that differentiates it from tyranny, even if it goes unspoken or remains a source of dispute and conflict. As other chapters in this volume show, constitutions, rights, and institutions provide the boundaries for popular sovereignty in the contemporary era. The tyrant is the only one who is truly free from other bounds and so when the people violate rights claims or ignore the rule of law, they act more as tyrants than sovereigns.

Ancient Tyranny

In contemporary usage, tyranny signifies absolute, unbounded rule and carries a judgment about the (im)morality of this form of governance. A tyrant is a terrible and amoral thing, prone to cruelty and violence. Yet, these moral judgments were not part of the earliest Greek meaning. In this section, I read this development as a contest over the meanings of different forms of political life, with tyrannos serving as a useful and dynamic container for multiple meanings. We can see the literary record as a collective attempt to work out the practical political problem of the limits of legitimate but unaccountable power – authority endowed with the stability to maintain the polis, but which rejects the crude realism of unbounded power. Both sovereign power and tyranny have no higher authority; deferring to no one, they are not required to offer an account to any others. Yet, tyranny in Athens moves from a designation of a way of ascending to that sort of unaccountable power (which monarchs or the demos itself might wield) to a terrible state of enslavement, leading to tragic reversal.

Many commentators have pointed out that, for the ancient Greeks, tyranny was, at first, a relatively neutral term.Footnote ¹⁰ The tyrant was one who came to power outside the conventional hereditary lines – as well as their heirs (thus, Peisistratos and his sons were considered tyrants). The term itself probably came from the Lydian word for king and the earliest usage appears in the work of the archaic poet Archilochus, who describes tyranny as something most men would want, with no negative inference. Tyranny there connotes the exceptional state of freedom and power of monarchs, but not necessarily depravity or cruelty. Although Archilochus is not Athenian, we see the same neutral-to-positive usage in Athens as well and a positive use of the term is “well-established by the fifth century.”Footnote ¹¹ In other sources the meaning varies; Herodotus used it interchangeably with basileus (king) and archon (ruler), although he also uses it to refer to despotic rulers, particularly in reference to Eastern/Persian kings.Footnote ¹² Regardless, the allure of tyranny never fully fades, even as anti-tyranny ideology took hold in Athens. Even Plato’s would-be tyrants speak of tyranny as so obviously useful and desired that Socrates’ critiques are clearly laughable. This makes sense given the origin of the word. The tyrant was an usurper, which meant he rejected – and so was released from – tradition and convention. This rejection was the source of his freedom, which would then expand to other realms. According to Arlene Saxonhouse, the tyrant was the ruler “without limits … whether moral, physical, or historical … [he was] the new ruler.”Footnote ¹³ It did not necessarily mean he was despotic (despotes – the Greek here referring to mastership over slaves) or immoral, although a writer like Plato will link this unbounded freedom to a desire to enslave others.

The broader political context also shaped and was shaped by this discursive development. Tyranny “provide[ed] the analytical framework for understanding constitutional forms,” allowing Athenians to criticize or praise various forms of political life.Footnote ¹⁴ That is, it was not necessarily opposed to a particular form of government and history shows that a tyrant like Pesistratos paved the way for the democracy, as he weakened oligarchic (conventional) power.Footnote ¹⁵ As political norms shifted, so did the understanding of tyranny, its advantages, and the threats it posed. While Athenian literature often contrasts monarchy (and, later, democracy) with tyranny, the historical rise of tyranny was more of a “twist in an intra-aristocratic drama” than the usurpation of monarchical dynasties.Footnote ¹⁶ That is, there were no monarchs displaced by tyrants, despite the stories of Greek tragedy. Instead, tyrants provided transitional moments between the aristocracies that ruled archaic poleis, besting the oligarchs at “the very same games” they themselves played but without the lineage to claim legitimacy.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, alongside the positive connotations already noted, negative associations sprang up quickly – not because tyrants were immediately viewed as inherently bad, but because tyrants threatened established power structures. The earliest known anti-tyranny law appear to be from the Draconian era, thus predating the radical democracy of the late sixth century.Footnote ¹⁸ Later, with the rise of democracy in Athens, tyrants remain the object of approbation, even as the tyranny of Peisistratos did much to give rise to democratic forces within the polis. By the time of the Cleisthenic reforms, anti-tyranny sentiment becomes part of the bouleutic oath.Footnote ¹⁹ So rather than a stable meaning rooted in conceptual ideals, tyrannos and its cognates were first relatively value-free indicators of the mode of ascension for particular rulers, and then underwent a transformation whereby opponents layered further meanings onto the term in order to disarm the threat tyrants posed to entrenched authority, whatever form that took. The very development of the term is a story of political struggle.

The addition of immorality came about after the so-called age of tyrants (650–510 BCE). Confusing matters, it was often retroactively imputed to earlier tyrannies as a result of “anachronistic prejudices and assumptions.”Footnote ²⁰ Thus, the cruelty of archaic tyrannies is historically questionable, although it does reveal much about these later discursive constructions. In order to ensure the lines between legitimate and illegitimate final authority (i.e., it is legitimate for the demos to wield this authority, but not for a single man to do so), the lone tyrant is made into a deviant, someone who violates the natural order. This was an easy move since the tyrant’s release from convention (of hereditary succession) could also be pushed to mean release from other human and divine norms. Tyranny moves from indicating a ruler who gained his title not through lineage to end up indicating a ruler who would violate even the most basic sexual taboos because of his refusal of any restraint. Parker notes the earliest negative uses appear with Solon in the first half of the sixth century, although the meaning is not an outright condemnation: he notes tyranny may appear desirable but actually will lead to ruin.Footnote ²¹ It is only later with Thucydides that we get a consistent negative valence to the term and it becomes fully distinct from legitimate kings and other rulers. From this point, tyranny is seen as a threat to be contained, not merely unconventional but dangerous. In Book VIII of Plato’s Republic, the tyrant comes after democracy because the love of freedom without rule dominates to such an extent that the city becomes disordered, leading to the demagogic usurper taking power. He himself is lawless and unjust – preferring his own freedom to pursue his base appetites rather than submit to the rule of wisdom. This leads to hatred and instability, thus ironically causing his own loss of freedom in the end.

The anti-tyranny stance eventually becomes a crucial part of Athens’ democratic ideology, even as oligarchs were also critical of tyrants since they threatened their power in the archaic polis. According to James McGlew, it was an “important and flexible conception for moments of political resistance,” used to criticize those, like Alcibiades, who might be gathering too much power.Footnote ²² Athens had laws against the promotion of tyranny, as well as mechanisms like ostracism to guard against any single man from becoming powerful enough to attempt to establish a tyranny. The story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton was largely myth but was promoted by the city as way to shape and reshape Athenian “constitutional history” and define the democracy as restoration of an earlier form of rule in the city and against tyranny.Footnote ²³ The story also helped solidify the notion of tyrants as despotic criminals who lacked self-control and so veered into moral perversion, rather than simply new leaders who took power by unconventional/illegal means (and perhaps took it from the oligarchs who likewise threatened democratic norms). Moreover, the tyrant is linked to despotes, the slave-master, which means those living under tyranny were themselves slaves, which was a violation of the democratic equality (isonomia) and freedom (eleutheria) so important to Athenians’ self-conception (and which helped justify their imperial tyranny).Footnote ²⁴ Thus, the “defense of the democracy tended to be equated with resistance to tyrants.”Footnote ²⁵

While the dominant ideology in fifth century democratic Athens portrayed tyranny as an undesirable problem, its earlier roots and this link with democratic freedom suggest a deeper ambivalence. The fact that comedy and tragedy continued to ponder questions about tyranny and freedom – and not always negatively, or else double-negatively (ridiculing Cleon for stirring up fears of tyranny) – also attests to this ambivalence. The “tragic tyrant embodies the Athenian experience of tyranny, belong to the aetiological past, and is adapted to the needs of the polis in the present … [and] projects anxiety about the autonomy of the individual citizens ‘onto its most extreme embodiment, the horrible isolated autonomy of the tyrant.’”Footnote ²⁶ That anxiety is rooted in the unavoidable tension between anti-tyranny ideology and democratic freedom. Tyranny is not simply a threat to democracy because it rejects equality, putting one person above all others; it is also the fullest bloom of the other animating force of democratic life – freedom. This sort of freedom ultimately requires one person to control all others, to refuse the possibility of their freedom. Much of the Athenian ideology denied the link between freedom and tyranny, instead it focused on how the individual tyrant would enslave the demos. But these relations are more entangled than binary; predating democracy, tyranny also serves as a model for the demos’ own authority. As James McGlew argues, “those who had political rights … collectively [shared] in possession of the tyrant’s unfettered personal power.” Rather than opposition, this is appropriation – making the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate usage of that unfettered power even more crucial. Along similar lines, Hoekstra details the ways in which the Athenian demos viewed itself as holding tyrannical power, meaning it was unaccountable to a higher authority.Footnote ²⁷ This was not necessarily illegitimate in the context of dealing with unequal others – it was only the threat of a tyrant holding power over fellow citizens that was a problem.

Yet, what if it is not the would-be tyrant out there in Persia or one ambitious man lurking among the demos but is in fact the Athenian demos – and its legitimate authority – that poses a danger to the polis itself? My gloss is that Sophocles’ play Oedipus is not just a warning about tyrannical power and the individual tyrant, nor it is about the blindness of the demos in its dealings with other poleis – Athens seemed generally unbothered by that – but a comment on the dangers of claims of unaccountable authority more generally and the internal threats it could pose. A site of contestation itself, tyranny’s meaning fluctuated, depending on the political context; it was not a stable, unitary anti-ideal, as we now think of it. Instead, it could refer to power that is used for any number of things, not necessarily bad, immoral, or cruel. The fact that it was considered to be ultimate power – just as sovereign power is considered to be – is what leads writers to draw tyranny to what they see as its inevitable outcome – tragic reversal – because no human power can escape some limits and because the aspiration to such power makes one particularly apt to rush headlong into those limits.

Oedipus and the Bounds of Power

In Sophocles’ version of Oedipus (c. 429 BCE), we first encounter the leader of Thebes as he tries to comfort citizens lamenting the miasma (pollution) that has left the women unable to bear children and the crops to die. Years before, Oedipus had come to power by answering the riddle of the Sphinx and being made tyrant (i.e., nonhereditary monarch) by the grateful citizens, whose king had been murdered while traveling. Thus, the current problem seems to be one well within Oedipus’s power to solve. He discovers that the source of the pollution is the city’s failure to bring the previous king’s murderer to justice and so Oedipus embarks on the path that will ultimately reveal him to be his own father’s murderer and to be the son of his wife, brother to his own children. At the close of the play, his mother/wife Jocasta has committed suicide, Oedipus has blinded himself with her cloak pins, and Jocasta’s brother Creon assumes the throne.

Many readers of the play take it to be about the inescapability of fate and a classic Aristotlian tragic story of someone with high status meeting a horrible end. Oedipus’s status as ruler seems more important than the particular character of that leadership as a tyrant, probably because he is not a tyrant in the recognizable sense of the word – he is not cruel and he offers explanations of his actions on repeated occasions – he is not obviously unaccountable (aneuthunos). Moreover, the tyrannos of the title was added later to distinguish it from Oedipus at Colonus post-Aristotle – and that title then gets transformed into Latin Oedipus Rex. Many translations stick with “king” throughout the text, perhaps to avoid imputing to Oedipus the wickedness we have come to associate with tyrants. Given the flexibility of the term, particularly at the moment Sophocles is writing, I do not think one should take the meaning of tyrant or the character of Oedipus’s tyranny as self-evident. Nor should we assume it was mere carelessness or poetic license on Sophocles’ part. As Bernard Knox had already clarified in 1954, the Greek terms – tyrannos and basileus – are not in fact interchangeable in this way – although they also were not distinct in the ways that led to the mistranslation (wicked tyrant vs. beneficent ruler). That is, tyrannos had not yet been fully de-habilitated, and still primarily indicated that – ironically – Oedipus did not (appear to) inherit his throne. Sophocles’ use of the word was not casual, nor an oversight: “fifth century Athenians understood perfectly well the difference between a king and a tyrant,” as their most recent past was in fact an “age of tyrants” (and, before that, oligarchies), not the mythical monarchical past.Footnote ²⁸ At the same time, we must also not assume that the difference between king and tyrant was the same for Athenian spectators as it is for later readers. Within this frame, it makes sense that when later translators and commentators wanted to capture the idea of Oedipus as a benevolent (yet, terribly unfortunate) ruler, they jettisoned tyrant because of the by-then pejorative implications of the term. But those did not exist in the same way for Sophocles’ audience, at least not completely. I want to suggest here that it was Sophocles’ portrayal that helps to cement the tyrant as morally perverse and politically deadly (although once expunged from the city, he serves as pharmakos for the future Athens at Colonus).Footnote ²⁹ As the fifth-century democracy deepened its anti-tyrant ideology, this interpretation makes a lot of sense. Oedipus is technically a tyrant in the older sense of the term – having arrived new to a city and been made ruler. He also seems to possess godlike powers of intellect – having bested the Sphinx and released the city from her plague. These are both neutral-to-positive versions of tyranny and very well fit with Oedipus at the start of the play. There he is presented as an admirable and kind figure, steward of Thebes and beloved by the people. He is gifted the throne – “though I had not asked it” (384) – coming much closer to elected leader than the tyrant who takes power by force, deception, or wealth. But he also fulfills – although unwillingly – the other, negative characteristics of the tyrant that are growing in influence during this period – murder of kin and violation of sexual taboos. He also grows suspicious and paranoid over the course of the play, losing the democratic posture of the opening and threatening those he sees as adversaries. The figure of Oedipus is not actually a tyrant in the older sense but is in fact a tyrant in the new sense. Oedipus himself personifies this discursive development. Moreover, the play also highlights the difficulty of making clear distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate unaccountable (aneuthunos) authority. In the end, he does offer an account of himself and his actions; he sacrifices for the good of his city, exiling himself. That is, he is accountable. Yet, he can never shake the horror of his actions nor account for them, no matter how unintended. The blurry lines between good and bad forms of political authority sharpen and the dangers of claims to ultimate authority – no matter how benevolent – are cemented for the demos watching and judging the play.

By making Oedipus a generally sympathetic tyrant while also including the second stasimon that blames hubris, and the tyranny engendered by it, for the downfall (763–910), Sophocles pushes the demos to think about the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate power and what exactly separates one type of ultimate authority from another. That is, the playwright not only uses language but also does something to it, changing the word and the political discourse, helping to move the understanding of tyranny away from a distinction between hereditary and nonhereditary rule and trying instead to carve out conceptual boundaries that have more to do with the quality of rule, providing bounds for even supposedly unbounded authority. Given the historical moment, it is not clear how different legitimate hereditary rule (whether monarchical as in the play or aristocratic, as in actual Athenian history) had been from tyrannical rule, especially in its most benevolent appearances – Oedipus (or perhaps one might think of Peisistratos – while a more complex case, not a tyrant who was thought to enslave the people). By embedding these moral crimes into the tyrant’s identity, regardless of his intent, Sophocles is making those lines more clear. At the same time, the particular details of Oedipus’s downfall reveal how even the tyrant – whether Oedipus or the demos – remains bounded by material conditions of human life – here, knowledge and time – and how the claims of absolute power engender tragic reversal because of the hubristic blindness to those constraints.

So what does tyrant mean in this play and how does it change? Both Knox and Arlene Saxonhouse note that the term is key to the play, as the drama revolves around Oedipus’s claim to the Theban throne – there is a world of difference between basileus (hereditary king) and tyrannos (ruler who comes to power by other means). In the end, of course, he turns out to be the basileus, which is why the final reference to Oedipus as king uses that word (1202), after consistently referring to Oedipus with some form of tyran- (six times from 380 to 939). Interestingly, Oedipus is not introduced to the action with either tyrannos or basileus, but ones that reference his power – kratunon (14) and kratiston (41). The first use of tyran- in reference to Oedipus is only after the first encounter with Tiresias leaves him angry and suspicious of both the prophet and his brother-in-law Creon. Oedipus is first identified by his strength, although it is not a cruel use of power for self-gain. Instead, Oedipus refers to the city as his tekna, his own children, and wrestles with finding a solution to the blight currently afflicting Thebes – his power will be used to aid them, not to indulge his own appetites. As Knox notes, the interactions between Oedipus and the citizens are direct – not mediated by an armed retinue – and seem more like a democracy led by a first citizen than any of the sort of tyranny we see with Creon later in Antigone or Aegisthus in the Oresteia.Footnote ³⁰ His power comes from his intellect, which was able to free the city from the curse of the Sphinx. Now he endeavors to do the same once again. As the action develops, though, and Oedipus comes to feel increasingly threatened (first by individuals he believes covet his power, then by historical fact), he is consistently referred to as tyrannos. This only changes again near the end of the play, when the Chorus refers to Oedipus as basileus (line 1202), after his true biography has been revealed.

Yet, it would be too much to read tyrannos as consistently negative or only indicating an increasingly fearful king, even here in the play. In fact, the first appearance of the word is not in reference to Oedipus, but his (bio-) father – although in reference to his throne after his death at line 128. The usage is logical since the office would become a tyranny in the most-conventional-at-the-time sense – occupied by someone other than Laius’ heir (as he was thought to have no heirs). The next reference to Laius is as basileus (257), which makes sense as he was the rightful heir to Labdacus, heir of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes. The final reference to Laius is again as tyrannon – in that case, Oedipus is beginning to recount the incident at the crossroads to Jocasta, when Laius struck Oedipus in response to his own attack on Laius’ driver. This particular instance is more vexing than the others – the audience knows that Laius is the rightful king (his father’s son) and, at that point, he still occupied the throne. Yet, this is one of those moments where I think Sophocles is being very deliberate – there is something about Laius’ behavior that makes him tyrannon, rather than basileus. What I am trying to show is that I agree with Knox – the terms are used quite deliberately, but it is also the case that tyrannos does not simply refer to a ruler who came to power through unconventional means – if that were the case, it should never apply to Laius. Instead, there is something about the quality of the rule that Sophocles invokes in various places. At the same time, the usage is not always in reference to the quality of rule either – as the term is also used causally and non-pejoratively with Oedipus at various points in the middle of the play. Moreover, while Oedipus has a great downfall and at times appears paranoid and rash (like those we later understand to be tyrannical) and inadvertently violent and sexual without limits (also some of the connotations eventually firmly affixed to tyrants), he is never deliberately cruel.

Maurice Pope suggests that perhaps Sophocles was trying to “defuse the title of its ill association” by creating such a sympathetic and kind protagonist.Footnote ³¹ Given Sophocles’ place in the discursive development of tyrannos, I think this is less likely than the possibility that Sophocles was pushing the term to its immoral valence, rather than retreating to the earlier, more neutral one. The connection with the patricide and relations with his mother are specific to later views of tyrannical excess; Sophocles chose Oedipus’s story and left none of that out for a reason. Yet, this is unlike the way in which Gyges moves from king’s victim/queen’s avenger in Herodotus to unjust tyrant in Plato. With Sophocles’ Oedipus, it was inadvertent and fiercely resisted (and then lamented). Oedipus is the tyrant who unintentionally violates the most sacred limits, forgetting there are bounds to his authority – if only because bounds are hidden from view. The only real culpability lies in his arrogance in not foreseeing such possibility. It is arrogance – hubris – that engenders tyranny, according to the second stasimon of the play (873–882) and leads the tyrant to cross boundaries that should not be crossed.

This opens the questions of exactly which boundaries Oedipus crosses. What propels political authority in this case from unaccountable (and therefore sovereign) to unjust? The most obvious explanation is natural law and religious order; he hubristically tries to escape his own decreed fate. But I want to take a realist view of the question here and focus on universal, material conditions that constrain claims to tyrannical power, ones that do not require discursive foundations like a shared understanding of religion or law. That is, I will not rely on “political moralism,” in Bernard William’s words, “legalism,” in Judith Shklar’s, or “politics-as-applied-ethics,” in Raymond Geuss’.Footnote ³² Of course, the Thrasymachuses of the world may not find this realist view to apply to them either (until it does, and it always will) but the argument I am making does not depend on some shared cultural or religious background.

Anyone with the hubris that tends to undergird one’s faith in the legitimacy of unbounded power – autocratic or democratic – is bound to fail because power is never truly unbounded. A true belief in the possibility of ultimate authority leads to two tragic realist errorsFootnote ³³: (1) ignoring the limits of one’s own knowledge and foregoing a form of democratic knowledge and (2) ignoring inheritance (this is different from not believing in fate; I am referring to trying to get around hard facts of history and the passage of time). Oedipus does these things, which lead him to miss boundary lines he should have seen, not because he explicitly desires tyrannical power, but because that is the result of a faith in the legitimacy and power of ultimate authority, whether sovereign or tyrannical. In these cases, freedom comes very close to an attempt to control, to act with final authority and remove vulnerability. Tyrants, with their freedom from convention, are perhaps most likely to ignore other boundaries as well, but these dangers afflict all those claiming ultimate authority. That this is not simply about the dangers facing would-be tyrants and instead extends to other forms of power is supported by the democratic framing of the play. The fact that Sophocles is speaking to a demos is evident in the ways that Oedipus interacts with the Chorus at first – strikingly democratic and not despotic. It is the experience of holding such ultimate power that leads the possessor to make particular errors, mistaking freedom in one realm for power and control in others. Hubris engenders the tyranny – but it is not simple overreaching arrogance. Instead, it may be born from a justifiable faith in one’s project – as Oedipus understandably has, given his victory over the Sphinx. This blind spot, born of his own faith in both his intellectual and temporal freedom, leads to the tragedy – as it can for any political actor, across space and time.

Democratic Knowledge as Boundary

While classic readings of Oedipus focus on Sophocles’ religious thought (e.g., Nietzsche’s interpretation in The Birth of Tragedy), recent political theory tends to focus on the rationalism embedded in Sophocles’ play.Footnote ³⁴ That is not to say that interpreters dismiss Oedipus’s downfall but they instead tend to put this not as a religion versus human wisdom problem, but as a commentary on the insufficiency of reason more generally. That is, the play shows the limits of human reason, not necessarily because religious law is inviolable, but because human reason, with or without religion out there in the universe, is itself always partial. It is the blind confidence in it that is the problem, not a rejection of the gods or religious authorities.

Arlene Saxonhouse’s seminal essay on Oedipus argued for the close relation between tyranny and reason; both are claims to transcend limits (metra) – history/convention and the physical world, respectively. “On the one hand the tyrant and the rational individual express our freedom to do and be anything; on the other, they reveal the dangers of such freedom.”Footnote ³⁵ With Oedipus, we have both tyrant and rational individual; or, rather, the latter leads to the former. He is a new kind of Greek hero, one who achieves greatness through his intellectual achievements, rather than physical ones (indeed, his is physically diminished because of his ankle piercings as an infant). As Peter Ahrensdorf points out, Oedipus ascended to the throne not by vanquishing the Sphinx through violent force like other Greek heroes (although the throne was empty because of his physical violence).Footnote ³⁶ Instead, it was an intellectual defeat, solving her riddle. The play opens with his quest to figure out the source of the miasma in Thebes, couched in his concern for the well-being of his “children,” the people of Thebes; he is suspicious of oracles and soothsayers – understandable given his past and his seeming ability to overcome it – and only sends Creon to Delphi when there seems to be no other option – after “wanderings of reflection” and “careful thought” (67–68). Still, his intellectual superiority cannot cross all boundaries. As Saxonhouse continues:

Yet, it is still not quite clear why he cannot; true, hubris leads one to ignore the limits, but what is the precise mechanism? What exactly does he ignore? In this first case, I want to emphasize the problem with faith in one’s own knowledge. It was not theoretically impossible to get the information – Oedipus was not bound to fail. But as individuals we are prone to partiality, bias, and are limited in our ability to know. Coupled with hubris, it leads Oedipus to not consider the possibility that HE does not have the information. Others do, and a more thorough investigation, earlier on, could have avoided setting down the path he did. He gets a particular piece of information from the drunk Corinthian (you are not your parents’ child; 779–80), then another piece from the Delphi (you will kill your father and marry your mother; 787–93), but then never puzzles out the two seemingly related pieces of his history, nor does he look for further information – he solves the problem, as he sees it, and moves on confidently. As anyone who has taught Oedipus to a class of undergraduates will find familiar, why does he never ask Jocasta her age (or just make a guess)? Why didn’t he investigate the death of the former king before the miasma? His belief in his own intellectual power leads to his dismissal of Teiresias and oracles when they seem to not fit with what he thinks he should be hearing. He cannot hear Jocasta’s entreaties to stop the investigation when it has become apparent to her who Oedipus really is. He even mis-numbers the “killer” after the Chorus repeatedly refers to “killers” (124) – although in that case, Oedipus is unwittingly correct. Moreover, there can be facts and perspectives one cannot help but ignore, even in the least blameworthy way, because they simply cannot be made apparent until other things change to reveal them. Political entities must act, but they must also leave open the possibility of new unknown unknowns.

Oedipus’s hubristic faith in his own reason might not be universal for all humans, but the unpredictability of actions and the difficulty of knowing all historical facts without relying on others is universal. And the dangers for popular sovereignty might be even more acute, as any constitution of the people always remains partial, as many of the chapters in this volume show. For example, when semi- and noncitizens are excluded from information networks and decision-making processes, crucial pieces of knowledge might not find their way into the calculus. Moreover, the belief in the legitimacy of popular sovereignty might be analogous to Oedipus’s faith in his powers of rational calculation, blinding the people, however constituted, to the fact that its knowledge is indeed (and must always be) limited. That is, the people do not even realize what they do not know. The boundary Oedipus oversteps here is not some simply hubristic faith in reason – but one’s own – versus a more expansive, collaborative – and ultimately humble and democratic – conception of politically relevant knowledge.

Time as Binding

The other way in which Oedipus oversteps bounds is temporal. Saxonhouse does a great deal to elucidate this from the action in the play, with a focus on his relations with his parents and children/siblings. I want to add some crucial details and make the connection to questions of sovereignty. One thing that falls out of most contemporary readings of Sophocles’ version is the larger framing of Oedipus’s story.Footnote ³⁸ Admittedly, the best sources for these longer myths are Pausanias (9.5.1–11) and Apollodorus (3.3.1–3.5.7), much later writers. But fragments related to Oedipus appear in Homer as well and, even more importantly, the story below is supported by lines mentioning Laius’ command from Apollo to remain childless in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes (690–92; 742–57; 801–802; 832–43), indicating these aspects of the myth predate Sophocles and would have been familiar to Athenian audiences. Great grandson of Cadmus and son of Labdacus, the young child Laius is exiled after his father’s death and grows of age with King Pelops in Elis. Overcome with lust, he kidnaps and rapes the king’s son Chrysippus, leading to the boy’s suicide and Pelops’ curse on Laius’ house – his line will not continue. After Laius returns to Thebes and takes his rightful throne, he grows careless in his relations with Jocasta, conceiving a child, although he had been warned not to do so. His hubris literally engenders a tyrant! He then sends the infant off to die of exposure. It is into this context that Oedipus tries to live a free life, avoiding the inheritance his unjust forefathers firmly bound to him. In the end, his effort is apparent in the contrast – never intending to do harm to the next generation, he gives it life, literally begetting children and solving the mystery of the miasma – and thereby destroys it because he too readily destroyed the generation that preceded him (Laius). Moreover, he treated everyone as his own children – the city (including the elders; tekna – children, as in offspring – is the first line of the play; later on, the language shifts to paides, children, without the genetic implication), losing the boundaries that separate one moment in time from the next, collapsing it all into a single moment. He ignores the temporal flow that fixes some facts into place, rendering them later unchangeable by even the most ambitious tyrant. Political actors – even those aspiring to (provisionally) unbounded power must face the reality of the passage of time, which locks human life and the physical world into finitude, even when that timeline crosses multiple generations.

It is not simply that Oedipus is trying to avoid his fate – which is too often read as an unfortunate whim of callous Greek gods. Instead, Oedipus has a family history and inherits the crimes of his fathers, yet does not know it (at least in part because of the belief in the sufficiency of his own knowledge). He is born into the world and tries to avoid this generational inheritance that binds his life to one of relative unfreedom. This sort of inheritance is a deeply undemocratic notion to most of us. Oedipus rightfully aims to reject his past and foretold future, fleeing his childhood (but not ancestral) home. He tries to begin anew, armed with his powerful intellect and nothing more. Once we extend the view of inheritance beyond familial lines and across political communities, the political import becomes even more clear. Tyranny – both in Oedipus and the actual historical record of Athens – begins as a release from convention, a rejection of past modes of governance, in favor of creating a new world. Note the similarity to Sheldon Wolin’s description of democracy:

Both democratic forms of sovereignty and tyranny require an untethering from the past, “a freedom to transcend the limits inherited from the past.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This emphasis on temporal freedom is not just the tyrant’s wish; it is evident in Thomas Jefferson’s claims to generational sovereignty: “we seem not to have perceived that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.”Footnote ⁴¹ Each generation may enter into agreements – such as taking on debt from France – but such obligations would only last nineteen years, ensuring that “succeeding generations are not responsible for the preceding.”Footnote ⁴² In this view, democracy requires that each generation has the freedom to make its own decisions and not be bound by the contracts or legal arrangements of its forebears. Yet, as contemporary debates around reparations and climate change make clear, political life has clear intergenerational dimensions, which cannot be escaped simply because of a faith in the power of freedom, whether conceived of as the tyrant’s unitary authority or the demos’ collective authority.

The fact that Sophocles wrote Oedipus for a democratic audience in Athens is also worth dwelling upon. Why should they care about the tragic realism of the tyrant? My point is that Sophocles was not simply warning good Athenian democrats to be on the lookout for would-be tyrants lurking in the shadows, somewhere out there in the city. Instead, Sophocles was – or he was also – revealing the practical limits of all claims to ultimate human authority, whether the good kind, or the bad kind – and however those norms and evaluations may be set and transform over time. These are the realist constraints on this sort of political power – the real, practical boundaries, without moral or idealist law (not that those are powerless or problematic, but this is a link across any human context – and which applies to popular sovereignty as well as ancient tyranny). The history of claims to legitimate authority reveals a wide range of boundaries and justifications – heredity, religion, ancestral law, natural law, popular consent, institutions, constitutions. Many of these bases and boundaries rely on abstract ideals and norms to both justify and limit the sovereign’s authority – democracy, versions of morality, a belief in nobility or birthright. Yet, conflict over those justifications continues on and depends critically on context and political persuasion. That is, there is no abstract ideal that has proven able to consistently limit and expand claims to sovereignty in a settled way. The case of Oedipus illuminates some of the universal boundaries on all forms of authority, whether popular or unitary, tyrannical or sovereign. These are neither grounded in claims about moral truth or human nature, nor do they depend on healthy institutions or respect for democratic norms – but instead are the practical and material limits to all claims to authority. I leave it to others in this volume to explore contemporary, historically conditioned normative boundaries applicable to particular cases, which can also provide boundaries for popular sovereign power. Sophocles’ contribution – in which tyranny is not characterized by the innate perversion of the tyrant, but will lead to the most terrible crimes nonetheless – centers on the epistemological and temporal limits of authority. No matter how well intentioned, claims to ultimate authority must practice some level of humility in the face of these inescapable bounds. Sophocles’ work does the work of revealing the fiction of ultimate power, providing an affective civic education about the dangers of forgetting the real boundaries on all power.

The notion of popular sovereignty is fraught with difficulty. It involves two concepts, each of which depends on assumptions that are hard to substantiate. The first is that there is a people, and the second is that that people is sovereign, that is, it has no superior. These difficulties are evident in the language one encounters in reflections on popular sovereignty, where terms such as “story,” “myth,” “creed,” “fiction,” and “make-believe” are not uncommon. Thus, Hume considered it a “wonder” how easily the many submit to the rule of the few, before declaring, “’Tis therefore on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”Footnote ¹ Hume’s observation was, of course, not confined to his own time, but was meant to be universal. In the middle of the twentieth century, Hans Kohn called nationalism “a state of mind.”Footnote ² In the late 1980s, Edmund S. Morgan, who began his study of the rise of popular sovereignty by quoting Hume, argued that “[t]he success of government […] requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not.”Footnote ³ Historian David Kennedy opened the 2017 film American Creed by stating that

In the same film, Condoleezza Rice added, “That’s what holds us together: this great American creed, that it doesn’t matter where you came from; it matters where you’re going.”Footnote ⁵ Even more recently, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah entitled his latest musings on identity The Lies that Bind.Footnote ⁶ These terms are unmistakable: life in common relies on belief.

Tocqueville captured this fact in a rich and oft-discussed passage, in Democracy in America, in which he argued,

There is a lot one could say about this passage, but I wish to single out a couple of issues of particular significance. First among them is Tocqueville’s assertion that the principle of the sovereignty of the people underlies virtually all human institutions. On a basic level this assertion is simply true. Where political constitutions are concerned, and as the second paragraph makes clear, all constitutions – monarchies included – require the acquiescence of the people they rule over in order to function. Where nonpolitical institutions are concerned, one might understand as “the people” the constituents of the group. Thus, for instance, the members of a family have to acquiesce to the rule of the mother if she is to be able to run the show. Tocqueville’s distinction between the fact of obedience and right to command is also important. Not all apparent obedience gives rise to a right to command. Indeed, most things that appear like tacit consent are in fact not. I am thus using the term “acquiescence” on purpose, to cover a category broader than tacit consent alone, since the absence of opposition can be due to a number of other reasons, such as inability to overcome the barriers to collective action, itself the result either of successful suppression or of an incapacity to organize.

But why should this principle be “ordinarily […] almost buried?” In part, I think it is because of our frequent inability to determine whether a certain multitude is actually consenting to a particular rule (right) or simply putting up with it for whatever reason (fact). More importantly, if all forms of rule do have their foundations in the principle of the sovereignty of the people, not all forms of rule want their constituents to remember that fact. During one of the most crucial moments in the evolution of popular sovereignty, in the early modern period, monarchs and their supporters had to deal with the question of the origin of political power and the role of the people in that process. Was it the people who conferred power upon kings and, if so, did that mean that kings were accountable to the people? In dealing with these questions, opponents of popular sovereignty sought to keep it buried, as much as possible. Even its friends, however, will be wary of the dangers inherent in activating it too often. Before it was rehabilitated in the last century and a half, roughly, the idea of the people was not a comforting one. Rather than signifying those immediately affected by the government and, thus, those who should rightfully determine its form and policies, the people usually evoked images of instability, disorder, and irrationality. It was more readily associated with the vulgus than the populus. Thus, even those interested in the well-being of the people have been wary of the inconstancy of the masses and the volatility that might result from truly popular sovereignty. Most famously, these concerns pervade the Federalist Papers. Reactions to recent referenda, such as those in Greece, on the Eurozone (2015), and, in particular, in the United Kingdom, on membership in the European Union (2016), reveal that contemporary democracies are far from immune to these concerns. Even under the best of circumstances, however, the need to get things done will require frequent suspensions of the sovereignty of the people in all but name. If “the people” refers to the vast majority of those living within a certain geographical spaceFootnote ⁸ and under common laws, then the progression from deliberation to action will involve smaller and smaller numbers of agents, so that if the entire people made a sovereign decision, its manifestation in a specific policy would be the result of ever smaller numbers of individuals charged with designing, implementing, and executing it. Thus, in his Social Contract, Rousseau distinguished between a body politic that is active, which he called “Sovereign,” and one that is passive, which he called “State.”Footnote ⁹ Using these terms, we could say that a frequently active people, that is, one exercising its sovereignty, would hamstring the state. At some point, deliberation has to end. There is, of course, immense value in reserving the right to return to and reexamine any decision, but that is the reason why in all constitutions, even the most popular, the principle of the sovereignty of the people spends some time buried.

Tocqueville’s passage raises a further set of issues: Of all the places to bury and rebury the principle of popular sovereignty, why the shadowy part of the sanctuary? This image is especially felicitous, for it captures simultaneously the theological dimension of sovereignty in general and of popular sovereignty in particular, as well as the fact that both components of the concept are shrouded in mystery, not simply in the sense that they are hard to understand or explain, but also insofar as they defy human understanding. Popular sovereignty is thus not only akin to the mysteries of faith, but also – frequently – directly tied to the divine.Footnote ¹⁰ For instance, King James VI of Scotland and I of England and Sir Robert Filmer, to invoke but two prominent theorists of Divine Right, argued that kings received their authority directly from God. Thus, the sovereign did not only rule by Divine Right, but as God’s lieutenant on Earth he also ruled over his subjects as God rules over human beings.Footnote ¹¹ Some of his powers were discussed openly, but the imagination was free to range over how far those extended and what God might do to those who opposed His lieutenant. This connection was by no means limited to Divine Right theories. Jean Bodin, whose Les six livres de la république (1576) James VI owned and had read, had argued for absolute and perpetual power in accordance with the precepts of natural and divine law,Footnote ¹² a position shared by Thomas Hobbes, who as we shall see paved the way for popular sovereignty by positing a social contract to which each individual was a party.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, fully cognizant of the significance and implications of this term, both theological and otherwise, Hobbes described that contract as a “covenant.”Footnote ¹⁴ Building on developments that can be traced back to Hobbes’s covenant, the Declaration of Independence asserted equality among human beings on account of their having been “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”Footnote ¹⁵ At the other end of the chronological spectrum, the theological dimensions of sovereignty are apparent in every major creation epic or story, from Gilgamesh and the Book of Genesis, to Hesiod’s Theogony. Hesiod told of how the titans and gods emerged, how human beings were made, of how power traveled from one stratum to the next until government arose among human beings.Footnote ¹⁶ Like the God of Bodin and James I, Hesiod and Homer’s gods never let go of their mortals; they remained directly involved in their affairs. Whereas Bodin’s God crafted man in His image, however, Hesiod’s gods were anthropomorphic to such an extent as to notoriously cause Socrates to ban poems about them from his city-in-speech, for lying about the divine.

In what follows, I wish to focus on three critical moments in the evolution of the concepts of the people and of sovereignty: Plato’s “Noble Lie,” Hobbes’s body politic, and Rousseau’s sovereign people. I argue that the first identified the problem and offered a top-down solution, the second complemented that with a bottom-up approach, and the third used the other two to reverse the position of rulers and the people, thereby giving us a distinctly modern conception of popular sovereignty. A truly noble lie is one that skirts the literal truth for the sake of achieving a truly good end. In Plato’s case, its purpose was to get the parts to work for a whole that is ultimately good for them, but which they cannot see. That noble lie, however, was predicated on the imposition and enforcement of a story from above. Sensing the need to satisfy the growing demand for agency among the people, Hobbes enlisted them and bound them in the social contract. On that foundation, Rousseau proclaimed the people sovereign and set the stage for a complete reversal, in which those in government are considered “servants” of the people. This type of comparison is especially useful in highlighting major shifts and differences and, thus, outlining the emergence and evolution of the concepts in question. At the same time, it reveals the degree to which the essential problems recur again and again, and that understanding their history is not an antiquarian exercise but an essential step to dealing with them in the present and future.

A Noble Lie

Socrates develops his city-in-speech in Plato’s Republic. That work consists of Socrates’ recollection of a long discussion whose aim was to discover the meaning of justice. Early on in that process the conversation diverges to consider “a far bigger thing,” namely, Thrasymachus’ assertion that the unjust man lives a “mightier and freer” life than the just. Socrates gains the upper hand over Thrasymachus, but rather than celebrating his apparent victory, he declares the inquiry a failure because the interlocutors debated the relative merits of justice and injustice without having defined them. To begin anew, Socrates proposes an analogy: If justice is a single thing with different manifestations, then perhaps it might be easier to look for it in something bigger than an individual, a city. They could then take what they learned about justice there and return to the individual, in order to pronounce on whether justice is preferable to injustice. Aided primarily by Plato’s brother, Glaucon, Socrates thus builds a city-in-speech based on the principle that individuals are not self-sufficient and that each individual should devote all of his energies to the task he is suited to by nature, sharing the surplus with his fellow citizens, because no one can do everything (369e–70c). The division of labor that shapes the city quickly leads to the need for more individuals devoted to different tasks. This expansion, in turn, leads to the need for more land and, thus, the need for an army to seize and defend it (373d). Socrates calls this army the guardians, and notes that their education will be crucial, since it must strike a balance between aggression (to defend the city) and moderation (to allow the guardians to distinguish their fellow citizens from their enemies, 375–76; cf. 410). To achieve this balance, the founders of this city must supervise its doctrines. They must discourage tales of weakness in the face of death, stories that malign the gods, and lies. The only exception to the last category is to lies told by the rulers “for the benefit of the city” (389b).

A division of the guardians into one group that should rule and another that should enforce the commands of the rulers and defend the city yields three classes: the guardians, the auxiliaries, and the craftsmen. Anticipating challenges to the city’s cohesion and its emerging hierarchy, Socrates proposes that they contrive a tale of the kind that he had made an exception for (414b7–8); Socrates’ term for this tale is ψευδω̃ν […] γενναι̃όν τι, which is usually translated as “noble lie.” While that translation is correct, it is worth adding, that the root of γενναι̃ον also points to generation or birth. As we will see, Socrates’ tale not only involves birth, but it is also generative of the city: that is, the city needs it in order to become established and to sustain itself. Socrates’ noble lie goes as follows:

Upon hearing this, Glaucon interjects, “It wasn’t […] for nothing that you were for so long ashamed to tell the lie.” Undeterred, Socrates continues,

The first part of the noble lie, then, binds these individuals together as brothers and to the land as their motherland, which they must defend if attacked. The second part explains the divine origin of the hierarchy in terms that preclude debate as to its validity; it has been ordained by the God and based on objective, if invisible, criteria. Together, they make up the story of how the city came to be, why it is special, why individuals in it are bound together and must sacrifice to preserve it, and why its hierarchy is as it should be.

Just before launching into his lie, Socrates told Glaucon that this sort of thing has “happened in many places before, […] but one that has not happened in our time – and I don’t know if it could” (414c). As he knew full well, however, even if the literal story sounded preposterous to his contemporaries, its essence was one that they would have been perfectly comfortable with. Indeed, it is hard to think of a nation whose founding myth does not conform to the basic contours of this story. Of course, fifth-century Athens – the setting for Plato’s Republic – has a special significance for popular sovereignty. As Socrates’ contemporary, Pericles, noted in his Funeral Oration, Athens’ laws were unique and, because they favored the many rather than the few, it was called a democracy, signifying rule by the δήμος, or, the body of the people, through the ἐκκλησία, its main assembly.Footnote ¹⁷ That meant that the people – namely, the citizens – were sovereign, making all important decisions in common and manning the city’s institutions, from minor assemblies to juries. The laws were indifferent to socioeconomic status and reputation, but looked to merit. While not using images as fanciful as those used by Socrates in his “noble lie,” Pericles nevertheless emphasized the active roles that Athens’ citizens played in its defense, in the rule of law, and in exhorting their fellows to act decently. As commentators have noted across the centuries, unlike his next speech, which was gloomier and given in the singular, the Funeral Oration is dominated by the plural, to reflect that at its best Athens was what Cicero and St. Augustine would later call “an affair of the people” (res publica), or, what later political thinkers would describe as a “commonwealth.”

A Body Politic

The frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan features the colossal figure of a sovereign presiding – with sword in one hand and crozier in the other – over a landscape meant to convey the peace and prosperity that result from his government (Figure 3.1). A superscript taken from the Vulgate version of Job 41.24 declares, “There is no power on Earth that compares to him.” Hobbes’s Introduction to that work quickly confirms the first impression that the figure on the frontispiece is a body politic. That idea was not exactly new. Plato had brushed up against it with his analogy between the city and the soul. In his actual city, “[w]hen an Athenian democrat said ‘demos’ he meant the whole body of citizens, irrespective of the fact that only a minority were able to turn up to meetings.”Footnote ¹⁸ Christians adopted the term the Athenians had used for their main assembly (ἐκκλησία) and used it to refer to their church, whose body consisted of the believers gathered together in Jesus’ name, so that by the twelfth century John of Salisbury could liken the parts of a republic to the parts of the body.Footnote ¹⁹ King James VI of Scotland could thus argue on well-established precedent that “[t]he King towards his people is rightly compared to a father of children, and to a head of a body composed of diuers members.”Footnote ²⁰

Figure 3.1 Frontispiece for the Leviathan

For Hobbes, the commonwealth or state,

This description leaves out something that the attentive reader would have noticed on the frontispiece, namely, that the torso and arms of the body politic are made up of individuals, all of whom are facing the head.

Hobbes gave the reason in Chapter 21, where he explained,

The suggestion that the commonwealth is the result of covenants, however, raises a series of important problems. One might be excused, for example, for doubting that such covenants ever took place. Even if they had, at some point, how could they be seen as binding individuals who had not participated in them? Assuming that such covenants had existed and were binding, did they also extend to the sovereign? If so, was he a party and, thus, obliged and accountable to the other parties? To answer these questions, Hobbes conjured a series of images to depict a lawless condition he called the state of nature, in which there was no authority that could generate rules and enforce them.Footnote ²³ Surely such a condition was one that any reasonable person would wish to avoid. Reason would thus lead individuals to realize that it would be preferable to establish a sovereign and obey him, on the condition that everyone else would do the same. Doing so would generate the body politic, a single entity with a single will.

How could this happen? Hobbes argues, “by Covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.”Footnote ²⁴ This passage set in motion the modern revolution of popular sovereignty, by pointing out that every individual should act as though he had made a promise to every other individual, to confer upon a third party the right of governing his person. As the passage I quoted above shows, it is the specter of the alternative that would induce individuals to behave in accordance with these hypothetical covenants, but because “Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all,” the surrender of individuals’ rights to rule themselves endows the sovereign with the power to be able to enforce the laws at home and defend the commonwealth abroad.Footnote ²⁵ This idea contains two important points. First, that individuals have the right to govern themselves.Footnote ²⁶ Their conferral of that right to the sovereign is thus, as Hobbes puts it, an authorization. The sovereign’s rule, therefore, is by right. Second, the sovereign’s ability to protect and defend is made possible only through the submission of the individuals who make up the body politic. To put it simply, the giant sword of the frontispiece is composed of the tiny individual swords that the sovereign unites and directs.

It would have been easier to justify submission to a sovereign through force, what Hobbes called a commonwealth “by acquisition,” so one has to wonder why a theorist who favored monarchy would have chosen this elaborate and dangerous route that passed through the continuous authorization of sovereignty by the individual citizens of a commonwealth. The danger, of course, lay in the fact that Hobbes located the origin of sovereignty in the individuals who engaged in mutual covenants with one another. If they were the ones who had given it, could they not take it back? Hobbes addressed this problem by making the surrender of the right to govern oneself irrevocable, with the exception of cases in which one’s life was clearly and indisputably in danger. Perhaps more importantly, his covenants were between individual citizens only. The sovereign who resulted from them was not a party to the contracts and, hence, not accountable to the contracting parties, but only to God.Footnote ²⁷

Hobbes chose the path that he did because he saw that more and more people would begin to ask the question that Hume would pose a few years later. A number of developments would make that inevitable, but foremost among them were the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, which shared one basic characteristic: They enfranchised previously excluded, irrelevant, individuals by inviting them to think for themselves and bypass authorities. If one could commune with God and understand the mysteries of nature on one’s own, how long would it be before that person wondered why he could not also govern himself? By persuading his readers that they had authorized the sovereign who ruled over them, Hobbes hoped to enlist them in the cause of peace.

Sir Robert Filmer captured the consequences of this move when he congratulated Hobbes for having treated the rights of sovereignty more “amply and judiciously” than anyone else, but rejected his premises, namely, his reliance on natural right.Footnote ²⁸ Filmer, for whom the idea of popular sovereignty was anathema, saw that Hobbes had created a dangerous opening. Hobbes’s many critics saw the opportunity in Hobbes’s fictitious state of nature and social contract, and seized it, making these concepts mandatory points of reference for modern political thought. The theorists we have come to associate with the origins of modern democracy and popular sovereignty, such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, attacked Hobbes not for having offered these fictions, but for having gotten them wrong. In successive modifications of the state of nature and the social contract, Locke and Rousseau returned to natural right and cast it even more forcefully as the solid foundation for civil rights that could be used by citizens to hold sovereigns accountable.

A Civil Religion and Its Prophet

Rousseau opened his Social Contract with a provocative observation:

Much in this statement centers on belief, so it is interesting that we are asked to believe a lie. Rousseau had in fact devoted a lengthy treatise to the origins of inequality before turning to the Social Contract. Even more interesting, however, is the fact that he saw it as his task not to break the chains, but to render them legitimate. Following in the footsteps of Hobbes, despite having criticized him, Rousseau posited a social compact that could be captured by the following terms: “Each of us puts his person and his full power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”Footnote ³⁰ The first step toward this contract is the unanimous acceptance, by the participants, of majority rule. Once in place, and to prevent the social compact from becoming

The difficulty in bringing this transformation about cannot be exaggerated. Rousseau writes of a multitude that is “blind,” of people who want what is good for them but cannot always see it, and of a judgment that seeks to know the general will but is not always “upright.”Footnote ³² To achieve public enlightenment in the face of these obstacles, it is necessary to have a lawgiver.

This lawgiver is not the member of a legislative body. He is a founder, a lawgiver in the sense of Lycurgus, Solon, or the members of the Constitutional Convention. He is a rare individual of exceptional intelligence, who can stand outside the state and determine what the best rules for it will be. He is one who “could work in one century and enjoy the reward in another,” notes Rousseau, before adding, “[i]t would require gods to give men laws.”Footnote ³³ The task before the lawgiver is akin to changing human nature, because he must transform solitary, antisocial beings into social ones. Yet, the lawgiver must do this without having any power to compel individuals to submit to the whole. As there is no state, there are no offices and organized means of coercion. Thus, Rousseau argues, “one finds at one and the same time two apparently incompatible things in the work of legislation: an undertaking beyond human force, and to execute it an authority that is nil.”Footnote ³⁴ To make matters worse, “there are a thousand kinds of ideas which it is impossible to translate into the language of the people.”Footnote ³⁵

These obstacles, Rousseau claims, forced the founders of nations to resort to the heavens, to “honor the Gods with their own wisdom,” so that the people would “obey the yoke of public felicity, and bear it with docility.”Footnote ³⁶ Rousseau’s guide here is Machiavelli, who in his Discourses on Livy had praised Numa who, wishing to reduce a “ferocious” people to civil obedience, turned to religion.Footnote ³⁷ In footnotes to his chapter on the lawgiver, Rousseau attributes to Machiavelli the view that “there has never been in any country a lawgiver who has not invoked the deity; for otherwise his laws would not have been accepted,” and argues that those who see Calvin as a theologian “fail to appreciate the range of his genius.”Footnote ³⁸ Using religion to achieve the superhuman feat of constitution is not an easy task, and one can only judge success by the later evidence of enduring institutions.

If the task of ancient lawgivers was superhuman, it was still made easier by the fact that their religions were national. Rousseau credits Hobbes with having been the only thinker to have seen that the advent of Christianity introduced a new difficulty by claiming allegiances across national boundaries and imposing two sets of often conflicting standards on its believers. Love of neighbor and love of fatherland do not go together, but “it certainly matters to the State that each Citizen have a Religion which makes him love his duties.”Footnote ³⁹ Such a civil religion has to be separate from any dogma that pertains to the afterlife or salvation. It should be focused on sociability, and its articles

In the absence of a national religion, argues Rousseau, and as long as one is not interested in a theocratic government, religious intolerance must be unacceptable as destructive of civil peace.

A Mixture of Fact and Fiction

If the first requirement of popular sovereignty is the existence of a people, noble lies work to establish it and preserve it. This is not an easy task, because, as Kant observed, human beings are marked by unsocial sociability, namely, “their tendency to enter into society, combined, however, with a thoroughgoing resistance that constantly threatens to sunder this society.”Footnote ⁴¹ Effective noble lies must recognize that centripetal tendencies are not enough for lasting societies, and that centrifugal tendencies cannot be eliminated and will need to be counteracted consistently and constantly. For all their differences, the figures discussed above approached the questions surrounding the founding and preservation of societies as both immediate political problems calling for specific solutions and as theoretical questions requiring reflection on enduring and ineradicable elements of politics. Without spelling out every detail, they realized that human beings are self-interested, they are constitutionally incapable of always seeing what is in fact in their interest, they do not like to be told what to do, they desire recognition, and they seek to make sense of things. Although often centrifugal, these characteristics can also be used to buttress sociability, by enlightening self-interest and creating and strengthening bonds and obligations.

Founding myths and national creeds must do this work, yet as Hobbes observed they will not suffice if they do not take seriously the human desire for recognition and autonomy. One of Hobbes’s great innovations was to harness these desires by enlisting individuals into the project of modern government. Realizing that people want more credit than they deserve and want to feel that they are in charge, he recruited them to the cause of order by telling them that they had authorized the sovereign. Another of Hobbes’s great innovations was to use these (negative) human traits as building blocks for a new account of equality that did not depend directly on the divine. As Filmer warned, this kind of foundation was one that a proponent of monarchy could not trust, and it was but a short time before proponents of the people seized on it and made it the foundation of the modern popular state.

On the one hand, these developments furthered the political emancipation and enfranchisement of ever-increasing numbers of people. On the other hand, they generated large and active bodies politic of a new kind. These developments were already evident in Rousseau’s thought. Having proclaimed the people sovereign, the general will infallible, and the need to set dissenters straight by forcing them to be free, and having railed against the “supposed cosmopolites,” who “love the Tartars so as to be spared having to love [their] neighbors,” it is unsurprising that Rousseau was not just credited with democracy, but also blamed for nationalism and totalitarianism.Footnote ⁴² When the Abbé de Saint-Pierre published his proposal for perpetual peace, Rousseau mocked him for having “judged like a child.”Footnote ⁴³ One could argue that Rousseau himself was naïve, or even irresponsible for proposing measures that required conditions quickly disappearing along with the city-states that had once made them possible. With technological advancement, trade, and innovations in bureaucratic efficiency, states began to grow and the raw material of the body politic changed dramatically. In these conditions, it became necessary to revisit and repackage noble lies, especially in relation to public education systems that began emerging at the time. These developments sped up the march toward universal enfranchisement that was long underway and impossible to halt.

It is perhaps apt that even though Rousseau died before the French Revolution, its principal agents (many of whom he had fallen out with) exhumed and transported his remains to the Pantheon, thereby elevating him to democratic sainthood and rendering his Social Contract a sacred text of modern democracy. This status is also ironic, however, because Rousseau envisioned a democracy very much unlike the ones that claimed him. In the Social Contract, he had notoriously held up Corsica as the nation that would astound all of Europe with its success, because it had all the right ingredients: It was a small island with a homogeneous population, isolated from the immediate effects of bad neighbors and commerce, and based primarily on an agricultural economy that could not lead to excessive economic inequality.Footnote ⁴⁴ Its small size was crucial to its potential success because Rousseau’s ideal state was one in which citizens would participate in legislation directly. Modeled after the small city-states of antiquity that Rousseau so admired, as well as his native Geneva, the polity that would make his social compact a reality would thus be one in which citizens would themselves participate directly in the proceedings that would declare the general will. As Rousseau warned, “[s]overeignty cannot be represented for the same reason that it cannot be alienated; it consists essentially of the general will, and the will does not admit of being represented.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The thread that leads from Socrates’ noble lie to the modern belief in the sovereignty of the people centers on the fact that government – whether monarchical, oligarchic, or popular – depends on the minds of the governed. Morgan noted that in thinking about the nascent United States of America, Madison did not foresee the ways in which parties and politicians would dominate its politics, which was ironic given his own role.Footnote ⁴⁶ In its basic form, however, that problem had already plagued the model and inspiration of modern democracy, Athens. As Plato’s Socrates had warned repeatedly, aided by self-congratulation and a chorus of ignoble lies, that great city had fallen into a slumber. The dependence of its politics on rhetoric and its susceptibility to manipulation weakened its body politic and paved the way for its downfall.

Madison and his colleagues were fully aware of the extent to which success depended on the establishment of realistic institutions that would serve as checks on human nature, which, as Rousseau had observed, cannot be changed. In Federalist 51, he noted that the issue which had occupied Rousseau and Hume was but a part of the problem:

If this observation is correct, which I think it is, then we have to ask ourselves what it implies about a political system in which the people believe that they are sovereign. As a body they are in fact checked by governmental institutions and laws when these work well. As individuals, however, democratic citizens have been enfranchised and, increasingly, abandoned to figure out for themselves what they ought to do. The forces that used to offer direction, for better or worse, have waned, and new technologies have made it possible for more people than ever to catch glimpses of the rest of the world. Coupled with economic forces that have entangled parts of the globe with others previously unknown, individual citizens of democratic societies are facing the challenges that previous generations faced in the twentieth century, as well as ever more powerful ones imposed by globalization and cosmopolitanism. Calls for allegiance to humanity abound, and in a world that witnessed the horrors of the twentieth century they are necessary checks to parochialism and chauvinism, but they are rarely concerned with the practical implications of the concept. For better or worse, individual citizens have to face those or cede responsibility to others. Rousseau, who did so much to bring popular sovereignty to this point, had warned that “[a]s soon as public service ceases to be the Citizens’ principal business, and they prefer to serve with their purse rather than with their person, the State is already close to ruin.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Instrumental rationality will confirm that it is better for an individual to serve with the purse, rather than her person, so reason alone will not be able to convey that true sovereigns have duties and ought to act. With precious few exceptions, in the grand scheme of things, popular sovereignty outside the darkness of the sanctuary and perpetually in daylight is a relatively new story. It is thus understandable that its emphasis has been on seizing power away from individuals and small numbers of people who wish to rule at the expense of the many. As it matures, however – and because the size of modern bodies politic makes them especially susceptible to free riders – it needs to develop a better story of the individual responsibility to know and act, as well as a convincing narrative in favor of solidarity, if it is to remain vibrant and beneficial.Footnote ⁴⁹

Introduction

Scholars often portray the modern idea of popular sovereignty as having superseded premodern conceptions that invested supremacy in the divine right of kings, the medieval “lore of the Right of Communities,” exclusive privileges of class or caste, or even in the faculty of reason itself.Footnote ¹ In this familiar narrative, the concept of popular sovereignty – that is to say, sovereignty of the people – is juxtaposed with other modes of sovereignty that are non-popular: for example, rule by gods, priests, kings, judges, transcendent reason, parliaments, aristocrats, medieval corporations, and so on. Without denying the novelty of investing rule in a whole people, rather than some elite subset thereof, the prevalent emphasis on the democratic aspects of sovereignty has tended to eclipse another connotation of the term. This is the sense in which popular sovereignty entails the rule of a particular people. Or put differently, popular sovereignty implies not just rule by the people but also and maybe more importantly by a people, some particular group entrusted with ruling itself which is, or should be insofar as possible, unique.

Popular sovereignty understood along both of these dimensions – democratic or popular rule by a distinctive people or populace – represent “fictions,” in the words of Edmund Morgan. By this he means they are stories inhabiting the realm of “make-believe,” but which nevertheless possess enormous power to shape, organize, and legitimate political life.Footnote ² Neither of these two stories about political legitimacy – that sovereignty is vested in the whole community, and that this community should be differentiated from other communities – is self-evident. In fact, both propositions have been subjects of vehement moral, political, and scholarly controversies.Footnote ³ Yet, the underlying relationship between these two fictions – sovereignty and nationhood – is poorly understood. Which is the proverbial chicken, and which the egg? Is the existence of a culturally (or ethnically) distinctive people a necessary precondition for the legitimation of popular sovereignty? Sovereignty is derivative of peoplehood. Or, alternatively, must the fiction of such a homogenous people be invented in order to advance the claim that it is the whole people – rather than some exclusive unit within it – that ought to reign supreme? Do homogenous peoples precede popularity, or is popularity required to render peoples homogenous?

One thinker who has not been given enough credit for his contribution to these lines of inquiry is Thomas Hobbes. To be sure, Hobbes’s affinities for certain core conceptions of liberalism such as individuality, natural rights, and the popular authorization of sovereign power have been duly noted by critics and admirers alike.Footnote ⁴ Nonetheless, the proto-liberal aspects of his political theory tend to be overshadowed by his more obvious endorsement of absolute monarchy. The puzzling tension between Hobbes’s liberal egalitarian assumptions and the absolutist political conclusions he derives from them has sparked generations of disagreement about how best to characterize his place in the history of ideas. Is Hobbes the first liberal? A forerunner of modern totalitarianism? Defenders of the first position cite Hobbes’s appeal to pre-political individuals invested with natural rights, while critics of Hobbes’s authoritarian tendencies lament his defense of virtually unlimited and unaccountable sovereign power. While building on familiar scholarly debates, in this chapter I want to cast light on three less explored aspects of Hobbes’s arguments that speak directly to the question of how the dual fictions of sovereignty and peoplehood intersect with one another.

The first is Hobbes’s distinction between “persons” and “men” – that is, between actual human beings endowed with distinguishable identities, or personae, on the one hand, and the generic individuals who populate Hobbes’s state of nature, on the other. The ascendancy of the abstract individual at the expense of concrete personae gives rise to a second building block of modern conceptions of popular sovereignty: namely, the reign of quantity and the depreciation of quality. Assuming an underlying identity among individuals, popular sovereignty is predicated on our ability to measure their respective wills quantitatively. As Hobbes describes in Leviathan’s brief democratic interludes of popular sovereignty, the individual who affirms his political will does so by means of a mathematical exercise in which particular wills are aggregated quantitatively and qualitative distinctions are elided. Finally, the model of solidarity toward which the Hobbesian theory of sovereignty intends is characterized by the pursuit of “uniformity,” a form of social cohesion based on homogeneity and the wholesale conformity of individual wills. By way of contrast, what Hobbes castigates as “asperity” on the part of subjects must be resisted not only because the existence of a “multitude” of discrepant wills poses a challenge to political unity, but also because such unequal persons represent “diversity” and “irregularity” rather than commensurability (Ch. 15, p. 95).Footnote ⁵ They defy the mathematical equivalency upon which the logic of popular sovereignty depends.

By teasing out these three aspects of Hobbes’s political theory we can better appreciate some of the essential characteristics of modern doctrines of popular sovereignty that have caught the attention, for better or worse, of latter-day critics and defenders. My argument will proceed in the following way. The first section examines how Hobbes’s hypothesized state of nature abstracts from the distinctive (and unequal) features that differentiate real persons in civil society. His rationale for transforming so-called “persons” into “men,” I contend, is to generate both the moral equivalency requisite to majority rule (second section) and the cultural homogeneity and uniformity by which whole peoples can be differentiated from one another (third section). The last section further amplifies the dialectical relationship between national homogeneity and international heterogeneity to which Hobbes’s account of sovereignty gives rise.

Men and Persons

Like the concept of popular sovereignty, Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy rests on a fiction of its own: namely, the novel image of a state of nature. The state of nature is fictional in two respects. First, as critics have noted, the historico-anthropological reality of a “state of nature” is dubious, and evidence cited for it of varying degrees of plausibility.Footnote ⁶ Even allowing for the existence of such a pre-political condition sometime or somewhere, however, why would it be comprised of the kind of abstract, unencumbered “men” Hobbes portrays? Unlike civil society’s personae endowed with particular identities, statuses, and personalities, the “men” of Hobbes’s state of nature are generic, defined by a common physical vulnerability and a “similitude of the thoughts and passions” (Intro: 5; 13: 74). Even if these pre-political men enjoyed distinctive statuses before they entered into a political community – a fact which Hobbes takes great pains to deny – each presumably surrenders his individual will and judgment upon entering into a “real unity of them all” (17: 109).

Before we get to the transformative quality of Hobbes’s social contract, we are confronted by the ambiguities of personhood – and related notions of personality and personation. “A person,” Hobbes notes, “is he whose words or actions are considered either as his own or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction” (16: 101). Persons in the former incarnation are owners of their own “words or actions.” More significant for our purposes, however, is the latter meaning of “person” as someone who stands in for another. To “personate” someone is to represent them by virtue of playing their role, bearing a mask or disguise as on a stage, acting as them or speaking on their behalf. Individuals who “impersonate” others must not be conflated with the identities they assume on stage, however. Presumably, the intention of the actor charged with personating another is to represent the latter’s words or actions as faithfully as possible, even if it means wearing masks or hoods which “disguiseth” themselves (16: 101). The very act of donning a mask, or more generally playing a role, assumes that as social beings we each have unique qualities. Personae are endowed not just with particular wills and voices but also with identifying features. The metaphor of masks is revealing insofar as they obscure the identities of actors not by rendering them generic or anonymous, but typically by superimposing upon them the recognizable features of particular persons they are supposed to represent.

This kind of personation or representation often takes place among so-called “natural persons,” in a variety of spheres ranging from theater to the law (16: 101). People impersonate other living, breathing human beings for reasons of entertainment, convenience, or legal representation. Besides arrangements between natural persons, however, Leviathan is centrally concerned with how the wills of natural persons get transposed onto an “artificial person” mutually authorized to act on their behalf (16: 101). As Hobbes explains, albeit enigmatically:

Clearly there is no unity found among a mere “multitude,” or aggregation of particular men. Without a formal agreement between each and every member to be represented by “one man, or one person” (“and,” we should note the qualification, “but one person”), multitudes are essentially heterogeneous. Political union under the guise of an “artificial person” is the only way to transcend differences and disagreements. Moreover, even if this political unity is strictly a function of the man or person doing the representing, rather than any antecedent “unity of the represented,” it seems reasonable to infer that this personation serves to eradicate, or at least obscure, the multitude’s original differences. Whatever the causes or motivations of the union, its most important effect is that the people are “made one person.”

Another paradox of Hobbes’s account of representation is whether the “words or actions” being “represented” by one for another are supposed to be expressed literally or figuratively, “whether truly or by fiction” (16: 101). When someone gets called upon to represent the will of another are they supposed to do so mimetically – like an actor who seeks to replicate as faithfully as possible the true personality and words of a character – or are they given creative license to engage in a kind of fiction (16: 102)? Presumably where the actor behaves as author of his own actions, he and he alone is responsible for the moral consequences. Yet, in other cases where the actor is expressly bound by some antecedent covenant, he bears no responsibility for actions done by authority of another (16: 102).Footnote ⁷ Inanimate objects, as well as “children, fools, and madmen,” are in the position of always requiring personation precisely because they cannot serve as authors of their own actions (16: 102–103).

In the case of the theater, when an actor (presumably here a “natural person”) attempts to represent the will of a single character, there is at least the possibility of doing so in a way that is true or literal. We often judge the success of an actor on just this criterion – the faithfulness of their representation. Does, say, Meryl Streep give an accurate rendition of Margaret Thatcher? Yet, when one person (natural or artificial) is called upon to represent the will of a multitude, it seems both technically and conceptually impossible for this multitude of particular wills to be expressed in anything other than fictionalized terms. The representative must either superimpose an underlying unity – one single persona – on the whole discrepant multitude, on the one hand, or represent these wills in a manner that is not completely true to their underlying disunity, on the other. Whichever way, the result is to some degree fictionalized: Either the people itself or the unified representation of their will is necessarily being invented.

Thus far we have seen that civil society (for we should note that this is what Hobbes is discussing in Chapter 16 and thereafter) nominally consists of distinct personae. In contrast to the personae of civil society, however, Hobbes’s state of nature is composed of abstract “men.” Above and beyond the term’s gendered aspects, which are themselves complicated by Hobbes’s anti-patriarchal rendition of the state of nature in Chapter 20 (“Of Dominion Paternal and Despotical”), what is most striking in Chapters 13 through 15 is the linguistic consistency with which Hobbes deploys the generic term “man” to describe human beings in the pre-political state of nature. The choice of words is so constant – indeed almost monotonous – that it can hardly be coincidental. The laws of nature pertain to “every man,” “all men,” “no man,” “a man,” “other men,” “most men,” and so on. By way of contrast, the individuating word “person” occurs only three times in Chapter 15, by my count, twice qualified as “individual person” and in all three cases referring to the specific victim of an injustice (15: 94, 97).

Hobbes’s generic language works to bolster his analytical egalitarianism. For in these same chapters of Leviathan we find his most famous assertion of human equality. Hobbes contends that “nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he” (13: 74).

Hobbes’s derivation of the postulate of equality may be controversial, if not altogether fallacious. But it bespeaks significant effort on his part to establish a substantive moral equality among all human beings. At the most basic level, our equality is established by universal physical vulnerability, as “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself” (13: 74). Likewise, with respect to intellectual differences, there is an even greater equality than bodily strength insofar as “prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto” (13: 75). These manifest examples of “equality of ability” lead to a not entirely desirable “equality of hope in attaining of our ends,” an equality of expectations that transforms the state of nature into a state of war via the tripartite psychological pathways of competition, diffidence, and glory (13: 75–76).

Equality as Uniformity

We have seen how Hobbes distinguishes between the generic and putatively equal “men” of his hypothesized state of nature; the heterogeneous and unequal “persons” who compose the unreformed “multitude” of civil society; and the potential “unity” that can be achieved only when personae come to be represented by a single natural or artificial person. What remains to be shown are the ramifications of this view of equality for his theory of popular sovereignty. I want to argue that Hobbes’s appeal to equality is directly related to his justification of popular sovereignty in two key respects: Men not only have to be equal but also alike in order for sovereignty to be popular and for peoples to be distinctive.

Speaking abstractly, there are (at least) two different ways of conceptualizing equality. The first is the notion that some shared characteristic or common denominator among members of a category is sufficient to establish their equivalency. The observation that all mammals are warm blooded, for example, is a proposition that establishes an equality among all creatures of the class Mammalia without denying that there may be salient differences between, say, bisons and bears. To say that one thing is equal to another is not to imply that they are in all ways the same, only that they share something in common. With respect to some decisive quality, they are equivalent – literally of equal value or worth. A second and more radical conception of equality goes further still. It refers to equality not in the sense of sharing some defining feature but by insisting on sameness. Equality is no mere equivalence with respect to one or more generic qualities, but rather a demand for likeness if not total homogeneity.

At first glance Hobbes’s definition of equality would seem to be of the first class of argument (men are equal in one and only one relevant respect: the vulnerability of their lives), and yet upon closer examination his intention is more along the lines of the second. For his identification of a single common characteristic – namely, mortality – gives way to an account whereby human beings are – contrary to our intuitive observation – rendered virtually interchangeable with one another – their natures determined by the average or common denominator. Putative differences of intelligence or physical strength become either matters of erroneous (that is to say, vainglorious) misreckoning, or they remain extant while being overshadowed by other qualities such as mortality and pride whose constancy across subjects becomes constitutive of our humanity (13: 74–75).

Even Hobbes’s grudging acknowledgment of natural inequalities gets transformed by a peculiar logic into a kind of rough parity. The capacities of individual men in the state of nature may indeed vary somewhat, he concedes, but by the same aggregative mathematical logic deployed in the case of representation that we will discuss below, these differences end up canceling each other out. Some are smart; others are strong – but when “all is reckoned together” they are just men after all, each about the same, one as entitled as any other (13: 74). In a logic all too familiar to the contemporary social sciences, especially economics, the acknowledgment of empirical variations poses no barrier to generalization or quantification. Instead it is precisely by dint of such variance among individual persons that one establishes a prevailing uniformity across the whole group.

Hobbes hardly denies the naturalness of pre-political inequalities, as we have seen, but he does try to diminish their practical and moral significance. Strong arms do not simply counterbalance dull wits, or vice versa. Rather, the claim is that regardless of any physical or intellectual advantages, these natural differences are more than outweighed by common vulnerability, so that even the “weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger as himself” (13: 74). Likewise, with respect to intelligence Hobbes finds “yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength.” Only an exaggerated sense of pride prevents people from acknowledging that intellect boils down to mere prudence, “which equal time equally bestows on all men” (13: 74–75). As soon as men begin to conceive of themselves as equal in one respect it seems ineluctably to follow that they will consider themselves equal in all others. “From this equality of ability,” Hobbes notes, “ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends” (13: 75).

From a political vantage it makes no difference if natural differences exist or not, and Hobbes is suitably equivocal about whether “nature therefore have made men equal … or if nature have made men unequal” (15: 97). All that really matters is that they “think themselves equal,” and of this much he seems certain. Given their conceit – right or wrong – they demand to be treated as equals, “on like terms,” or they will refuse to cooperate, even when unequal cooperation might be mutually advantageous (15: 97; cf. 17: 109).Footnote ⁸ Whether deontological or merely prudential in their foundations, Hobbes’s so-called “laws of nature” revolve around the central political axiom that once people come to think of themselves as equals they need to be treated as such wherever possible, publicly and privately, especially in matters of equity, lest even minor instances of differential treatment give rise to civil disorder (15: 96–99).

Hobbes is not just concerned with the affirmative claims of natural equality. He is also determined to debunk justifications of natural inequality, whether aristocratic or Aristotelian in provenance:

Regardless of whether this is an accurate rendition of Aristotle’s position, Hobbes’s refutation merits careful scrutiny. First, we should note his insistence that inequality (or at least political inequality) is not natural but instead the result of convention or “laws civil.” In this point and others Hobbes is fully in accord with his egalitarian legatee Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That said, there is considerable slippage between this assertion and the argument for natural equality in Chapter 13. What Hobbes has “shewn before” has nothing to do with moral worth or political status, per se. Rather the claim is, strictly speaking, that whatever risible physical or intellectual differences might exist among men in the state of nature are overshadowed by common vulnerability to death. Unless “better man” refers to one’s ability to kill another, then Hobbes’s moral inference here makes little sense. Second, there is the matter (as critic Clarendon deftly pointed out) of Hobbes’s fallacious slippage between a subjective and an objective account of human equality. As Clarendon notes, just because those of lesser wit refuse to accede without violence to the greater reason of their betters does nothing to disprove the latter’s inherent superiority.Footnote ⁹ The mere fact that “men think themselves equal,” and are thus likely to become uncooperative or intransigent if others refuse to grant their presumption, is hardly sufficient to justify on anything other than pragmatic grounds Hobbes’s “law of nature” that “every man acknowledge every other for his equal by nature” (15: 97).

Beyond the physical, intellectual, and moral equality Hobbes ascribes to human beings in a pre-political state of nature. there is also a sense of sameness or uniformity arising from the genesis of the political community itself. Much like his disciple Rousseau, Hobbes concurs that conventional inequalities of status, honor, wealth, or even gender come to distinguish human beings only after the institution of political society. Yet, rather than the “identity of our natures” being undone by civilization and the “clever usurpation” of government, as per Rousseau’s lapsarian spin in the Second Discourse, whereby the wholeness and equality of pre-political man give way to lamentable differences, for Hobbes the generation of the political community seems coterminous with the invention of an altogether novel kind of sameness and unity.Footnote ¹⁰

There is, for example, the notion that differences within civil society are eclipsed by the magnitude of inequality between sovereign and subjects. Differences of status and honor that may subsist within civil society are solely the result of the sovereign’s actions, and thus no man can claim to deserve these dignities by nature (18: 115; 30: 222). Moreover, whenever unequal subjects are in the presence of the sovereign any trivial distinctions get overshadowed by the eminence of the latter, just as differences between subjects and their earthly sovereign are diminished “in the presence of the King of kings” (30: 226).

The theological underpinnings of Hobbes’s argument provide further support for the notion of equality-as-similitude. There is, first, the Biblical conception of an equality established among mortals by dint of the manifest sovereignty of God over his creation.Footnote ¹¹ Whatever risible differences are manifest among human beings, these are insignificant against the backdrop of divine omnipotence – not coincidentally, the gist of the Job story from which the work Leviathan takes its name. Whether from a secular or sacred vantage, equality is often established against a horizon of profound inequality, if not domination. Besides this notion of equality through subjection to a common superior, there is a theological basis for uniformity as well. For it is a feature of Christian theology that God’s subjects are not only of equal status and dignity but also similar in kind: all one human species, created in God’s image, uniformly endowed with a faculty of reason, and commanded to love one another universally.

Above and beyond the theological dimensions, appeals to a civil religion constitute yet another grounds for fostering similitude within a political community. The covenant instituted among subjects represents “more than consent, or concord” necessary to sublimate rivalries and cement natural advantages. It is a “real unity of them all, in one and the same person” (17: 109). This unity is presumably religious as well as political. As we see in Leviathan’s frontispiece, the individual faces of subjects vanish as they merge together into one seamless unity of the body politic. The law is no mere contrivance of physical constraint but “the public conscience,” which supersedes over a “diversity” of private consciences by which the “commonwealth must needs be distracted” (30: 212). In order to minimize private religious disputes and to cement the unity of the political community, it “ought to exhibit to God but one worship,” whose very nature is to be “uniform” (31: 242).

Conversely, maybe the best evidence of homogeneity’s importance are the difficulties Hobbes associates with heterogeneity. The task of instituting a commonwealth requires one first to deal with the irregularities of human beings as “matter,” their proclivities toward “jostling and hewing one another.” The wise architect must make them “desire with all their hearts to conform themselves into one firm and lasting edifice,” which entails not only “fit laws to square their actions by,” but also and maybe more importantly a remaking of their character. The “rude and cumbersome points of their present greatness” must be polished away so that they fit together neatly. Any irregularity or “asperity” must be cast aside as unfit material. Without a certain degree of modularity on the part of the subjects, any commonwealth will, like a poorly engineered building, if not collapse immediately then “assuredly fall upon the heads of their posterity” (29: 210). “Contrariety of men’s opinions and manners” are at minimum a limiting condition on political life that must be reckoned with, if not eliminated altogether (Review and Conclusion [R&C]: 489). The “education and discipline” to which Hobbes appeals as remedies seem to have something to do with fostering a greater “similitude of the thoughts and passions of one man to the thoughts and passions of another” (R&C: 489; Intro: 4).

Quantity and Quality: Popular Sovereignty as Majoritarianism

Hobbes’s embrace of equality-as-similitude is most striking for its prudential dimensions. Equality precludes conflicts among subjects otherwise beget by their pride and vanity. Even if people aren’t really equal, we are obliged to treat them as such lest they take offense, Hobbes cautions. Likewise, similitude discourages subjects from falling prey to disagreements, disorder, and the breakdown of commonwealth. These similarities (and the underlying fiction of equality on which they rest) are at the heart of Hobbes’s project of creating a unified people, one of the prerequisites for popular sovereignty. At a deeper level, however, Hobbes’s postulate of moral equality lies at the very foundation of theories of popular sovereignty: namely, the equal value of the will of every single member of a people. For purposes of sovereignty, representation, and so on, no subject’s will shall be deemed ex ante any more valuable than another’s, not just morally or symbolically, but quantitatively. This mathematical reckoning of human equality, Hobbes makes clear, is at the heart of modern notions of representation.

Given Leviathan’s focus on a single unified sovereign who personifies the will of a whole political community, and therefore acts unilaterally on its behalf, we are not accustomed to thinking about its majoritarian dimensions. Except for the fact that the sovereign ultimately derives authority from the will of otherwise discrete individuals, Hobbes’s account of sovereignty looks anything but “popular.” Yet, in his discussions of how a multitude becomes constituted as a person Hobbes says a number of suggestive things about the democratic underpinnings of popular sovereignty. Hobbes’s concern is not only with personation – that is to say, how one artificial person comes to stand in for the wills of various subjects who authorize him – but also, albeit less obviously, with generic matters of democratic deliberation whenever a representative body of any sort has to come to a decision.

Assuming the existence of a representative body, on what terms should its deliberations be concluded? Must a representative body be fully unified in order to act? Does it require a simple majority or perhaps a supermajority? Why not unanimity? And what is the status of people who end up on the losing end of any particular deliberation? Is there any way in which the process of deliberation can winnow out worse from better opinions, such that the superior wisdom of a numerical minority might carry the day?

One aspect of Hobbes’s description is his strong sense of the majoritarian nature of deliberation. Every person who enters into the congregation or assembly has a distinct will that must be aggregated through the process of deliberation into a single unified “voice.” Hobbes stipulates “if the representative consists of many men, the voice of the greater number must be considered as the voice of them all.” We emphasize the “greater number.” This is to say that Hobbes’s way of justifying the practical and normative significance of majoritarianism is strictly quantitative, a kind of political math problem susceptible to precise solution: “For if the lesser number pronounce (for example) in the affirmative, and the greater in the negative, there will be negatives more than enough to destroy the affirmatives; and thereby the excess of negatives, standing uncontradicted, are the only voice the representative hath” (16: 104–105).

This mathematical justification of the principle of majority rule, we should note, does not rest on any epistemic confidence in the wisdom of the many. There is no claim that the “voices” that happen to be in the numerical majority are necessarily more intelligent than the minority whose opposing views they cancel out. Nothing is said about the tendency of better views to preponderate – that is, any suggestion that their numerical supremacy owes to their moral or epistemic superiority. Setting aside qualitative judgments about the superior wisdom of the majority, neither does our deference to the voice of the majority derive from the intrinsic value of the democratic process. Majorities are dispositive because they represent more wills, and not because there is anything empirically true or morally right about deferring to the views of the greater part of the community.

One crucial premise of Hobbes’s mathematical metaphor is the assumption that all voices are of equal valence or weight. The notion of affirmatives and negatives canceling each other out requires the mathematical equivalency of all voices. Unless every single voice carries the same absolute value – whether positive or negative – their contrary expression will not result in a precise cancelation, leaving behind a conclusive remainder. Uniformity is a necessary condition for reducing all voices to a single metric of quantification. And yet the quantifiability of democratic deliberation comes at the expense of any qualitative recognition of the voices in question, whether of the individuality of the speaker or the intrinsic merits of ideas being voiced.

The peculiarity of this argument may be seen by contrasting Hobbes’s stylized characterization with real-life deliberations in which voices are not all valued equally. As we know, some speakers enter the conversation invested with greater authority than others. When certain people speak, others listen more attentively. Likewise, regardless of issues of personal status, some voices convey ideas or arguments of greater wisdom or merit, and their qualitative superiority marks them out for distinction. It is telling that Hobbes’s metaphor seems to imply a purely acclamatory process, with the preponderance of voices carrying the day, whereas in actual deliberations, substantive arguments presumably matter.

In one sense the appeal to “voices” reinforces the depersonalization of the deliberative process, as in the case of a parliamentary “voice vote” where individual preferences are not recorded. Even so, there is another respect in which the concept of “voice” draws attention to the problems with approaching democratic deliberation through a purely quantitative lens. For we know that individual voices are in fact highly distinguishable – maybe even the quintessential identifying characteristics of real persons. Voices differ essentially. Whereas some are pleasingly rhetorical, others are shrill and grating. Still others exercise disproportionate sway solely by virtue of being louder or more strident than their peers. In an actual parliamentary assembly one would never be content with a mere voice vote of “ayes” or “nays” in any but the most clear-cut and uncontroversial matters, and thus the need for deliberation, a formal vote, and numerical tally. At the end of the day, however, when all voices are counted, the view advanced by Hobbes represents the triumph of quantity over quality. Regardless of the status, wisdom, forcefulness, or rhetorical seductiveness of a voice, when time comes to vote every will must be reckoned the same as any other. Without denying the possibility of substantive differences between them, with respect to political representation every political will gets treated as of equal value. Moreover, once the decision has been concluded on majoritarian grounds the losing side must conform its will to that which prevailed quantitatively. What began as a multitude distinguished by many separate voices gets transformed into a unity that acts with a single concerted will and speaks in one and only one voice. The results of Hobbes’s theories of representation and deliberation are identical: the conversion of discrepancy into unity.

There is one major qualification to Hobbes’s principle of mathematical equivalency, however, which takes us back to our earlier point about how popular sovereignty relies not only upon popularity, as determined by the majority, but also on antecedent notions of peoplehood. The flip side of Hobbes’s postulate that the wills of all members of a people should count equally is the notion that the wills of nonmembers may be deemed unequal. Quantity reigns supreme only among a given people. Indeed, the wills of nonmembers ought not to figure at all in the political calculation, the canceling out of positive and negative valences. Peoplehood is predicated not only on the reduction of its members’ wills to a purely quantitative dimension, but also on a qualitative distinction between members and nonmembers. It is not as if the wills of nonmembers of a people count for more or less than those of members, whether positively or negatively. There is no ratio or common denominator by which these external wills can be converted into a commensurable quantity. They are qualitatively distinct. Beyond the horizon of peoplehood extraneous wills simply do not weigh into the calculus of popular deliberation.

One might wonder why this is the case given the terms of Hobbes’s argument? As we have seen, Hobbes’s state of nature is populated by “men,” that is to say, human beings who conspicuously lack antecedent personal or collective identities. His anthropological rendition of this condition is at least nominally cosmopolitan: All “men” are defined by their biological mortality and governed by universal “laws of nature.” Moreover, unlike his legatees Locke and Rousseau, who both allow for antecedent ties that bind a “community,” “society,” or “people” into an identifiable pre-political collectivity, Hobbes is adamant that there is no intermediary social stage between the condition of atomized individuals and the formation of a commonwealth.Footnote ¹² How peculiar, then, that his theory simultaneously affirms an equality among subjects, on the one hand, and distinctions separating political communities, on the other.

One possible explanation is that it is precisely because Hobbes cannot rely – like Locke or especially Rousseau – upon the existence of any such pre-political aggregations that he needs to affirm so strongly the sense of similitude on the part of subjects. Uniformity or collective identity is not something that Hobbes can take for granted before the political genesis of a commonwealth; it is something that needs to be impressed upon subjects who would otherwise remain a mere multitude or aggregation. If I am right, this explains much about the relationship between popular sovereignty and peoplehood. Rather than peoplehood giving rise to and justifying popular sovereignty, it is popular sovereignty that must be tasked with forging a distinctive people.

Popular Sovereignty and National Homogeneity

Thus far I have emphasized the role of equality qua uniformity in Hobbes as constitutive of popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty as we generally conceive of it today is predicated on the rule of coequals who are regarded as morally comparable, if not sociologically homogenous, for purposes of collective self-governance. And yet there is a more fundamental way in which this uniformity relates to popular sovereignty – that is, the invention of distinct peoples who purport to rule in the name of the majority. The birth of popular sovereignty as a mode of governance is intimately connected with the formation of peoples who aspire to be sovereign over themselves. Paradoxically, their intranational uniformity represents the flip side of international differentiation.

In the age before the rise of modern democratic publics one could imagine sovereignty as a legal power invested in a specific person, family, or office charged with the task of ruling over a given territory. To be sure, pre-popular conceptions of sovereignty might derive legitimacy – at least in part – from the notion that this or that sovereign was the ruler of a distinctive nation, say, the French or the Poles, but the composition of that populace need be neither equal nor homogeneous. Populations over whom a sovereign ruled might consist of disparate ranks, hierarchies, orders, and ethnic groups, as they often did in early modern European kingdoms or in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empires.Footnote ¹³ While the subjects of sovereignty often shared a common language, religion, or ethnic kinship (real or imagined), this was not an absolute requirement of pre-popular conceptions. Sovereigns could – and often did – rule over highly variegated and internally heterogeneous communities.

Hobbes’s account of sovereignty, as we have seen, is preoccupied with removing differences that allegedly dispose a political community to conflict. Differences of religion, opinion, faction, or ethnicity are limiting conditions on social order. Pluralism or diversity is to be minimized if not eliminated altogether in the name of avoiding social conflict.Footnote ¹⁴ Conversely, homogeneity and “unity” are desirable means to peace and civil order. One key aspect of the growth of the modern liberal state, as Jacob Levy has recently suggested, is its connection to a powerful rationalizing and homogenizing imperative.Footnote ¹⁵ It is perhaps no accident that the age of popular sovereignty was also the age of nation building and the deliberate invention of homogenous peoples in the face of otherwise disparate populations. As Carl Schmitt notes in his Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second – if the need arises – elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”Footnote ¹⁶

One logical corollary to the Schmittean view that subjects must be uniform, regular, and homogenous is the notion that nation-states should be distinctive. Paradoxically, it is precisely because the individuals who compose a political community are allowed to have no personae of their own that political communities can be unique and differentiated from one another. We find this point expressed by subsequent thinkers such as Rousseau, for whom similitude among Poles, say, is what allows them to distinguish themselves so readily from Russians.Footnote ¹⁷ Conversely, as critics allege, it is by dint of mounting internal diversity in the contemporary world that nations become indistinguishable in the face of globalization.

Popular sovereignty may be predicated on the notion that the will of a nation is something that already exists. Peoples are organic wholes with their own unique mores, historical circumstances, and cultural accomplishments. Rousseau for one seems to be of this view. Their antecedent unity reveals itself once all the discrepancies, the “pluses and minuses,” or “differences” plaguing a community are summed up and thereby canceled out.Footnote ¹⁸ Every people has a general will; the political problem consists in ordering political communities in such a way that this will may come to be expressed. Yet, as Rousseau divined, this generality with respect to a given political community is at least in part a reflection of its partiality with respect to other nations. The Genevan’s Discourse on Political Economy boldly declares something only hinted at in Leviathan. Namely, in a world of sovereign nation-states the will of one state will be inimical to that of another. “The will of the state,” Rousseau observes, “although general in relation to its members, is no longer so in relation to other states and their members.”Footnote ¹⁹ For both, it seems, war is the ineluctable if lamentable result of conflicting wills. One of Hobbes’s most persuasive arguments for the empirical existence of a state of nature, we should recall, is that this condition obtains between sovereign states in the sphere of international relations, over whom there exists no sovereign to chasten their jealousies and animosities (13: 78).

The collective self-determination of communities in a world of sovereign nations demands the minimization – if not elimination – of discrepant elements in the name of political cohesion. Yet, as Schmitt hinted in the above-cited passage, it is only a small step beyond the negative logic of removing contingent differences to the stronger claim that political communities must be rendered internally homogenous and externally distinctive irrespective of deep and fundamental differences of culture or character. It is perhaps no accident that classic efforts to remake political communities from the ground up – say, Eugen Weber’s story of “peasants into Frenchmen,” Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” or Ernest Gellner’s superimposition of high over low culture – have been undertaken in the name of “inventing” forms of homogeneity that did not previously exist.Footnote ²⁰ Solidarity is no longer conceived of as polishing away asperity, irregularity, contrariety, and differences within an otherwise cohesive political community, as originally expressed by Hobbes (15: 95; R&C: 489). Rather it is a matter of actively cultivating national distinctiveness in a way that generates commonality among members of a nation-state precisely by setting them apart from other nations.

By this logic, then, nations only become distinctive vis-à-vis other nations when individual citizens surrender their distinctiveness vis-à-vis other citizens. Ironically, for all of his gestures in the direction of international conflict and the sublimated war that obtains between nations in an international system, this corollary of Hobbes’s theory was left for the likes of Carl Schmitt and others to apprehend in the first decades of the twentieth century. Intranational unity reinforces international antipathy, if not outright war. “The political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity,” Schmitt elaborates: “As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than just one state.”Footnote ²¹

Conclusion

Thus far we have considered Hobbes’s contributions to our understanding of sovereignty as well as his role in the emergence of modern ideas of popular sovereignty. Three of the main ingredients in the modern conception of popular sovereignty come to fruition in Hobbes: the idea of subjects as equal and interchangeable building blocks of the political community; whose wills are of equal worth in adjudicating the direction of the political community, even if only initially; and whose similitude within the body politic is what allows the political community to distinguish itself from other nations.

Hobbes’s insights into the nature of popular sovereignty have proven elusive, however, in that his views have more often been appreciated by critics of popular sovereignty than by its defenders. The latter tend to disavow the “totalitarian” Hobbes’s role in the development of popular sovereignty, whereas the former – most notably, Carl Schmitt – take Hobbes’s presentation as the aboriginal instance of the more general concept. Hobbesian sovereignty, for Schmitt, appears simultaneously demonic and benevolent, organic and mechanical, mythical and rationalistic, the culmination of legalism in a domestic context and the distillation of the extra-constitutional essence of a state of nature in the sphere of international politics. Its dialectical quality is best seen in the tension between its internal and external forms. “The more complete the internal organization of a state is, the less feasible it is for it to engage in mutual relations on an equal basis,” Schmitt observes of the Hobbesian logic.Footnote ²²

Schmitt’s appreciation of the mythical or theological dimensions of Hobbes’s theory casts light on one final question, namely, the precise nature of the putative homogeneity upon which Hobbes’s theory of popular sovereignty rests. If my reading is correct, and Hobbes is indeed obliged to turn to popular sovereignty as a way of forging uniformity and cohesion within an erstwhile “people,” there remains the question of what form that cohesion is most likely to assume. What sort(s) of uniformity does Hobbes intend? To put this in contemporary terms, is the Hobbesian political community likely to be “civic,” “cultural,” or “ethnic” in nature?

Unlike more paradigmatic nationalist thinkers such as Rousseau, Herder, or Fichte, the ethnic conception of the nation seems fundamentally incompatible with Hobbes’s framework. Appeals to a given ethnie or “people” have little place in Hobbes’s argument, and for reasons that should be intuitive by now. Unlike his contractarian brethren Locke and Rousseau, Hobbes allows no intermediary stage of society or peoplehood to mediate his stark dichotomy between civil association and the atomized individuals of the state of nature. As we have seen, Hobbesian individuals appear as generic “men,” individuated “personae,” or discordant “multitudes,” not as bearers of pre-political communal identities or members of discernible ethnic groups. Although it is incumbent on the abstract men of Hobbes’s state of nature to assemble themselves into some kind of political community, there is no logic – other than expediency, and scarcely mentioned accidents of history or conquest – for them to affiliate under any particular national configuration. Ethnic modalities of the nation, then, seem fundamentally incompatible with Hobbes’s individualistic and materialist ontology.

Conversely, and for many of the aforementioned reasons, the model of a civic nation looks more congenial to Hobbes’s orientation, at least at first glance. The civic model does not assume underlying ethnic or racial ties among subjects that would link them to any particular group of people. Instead it reduces political membership to an abstract, rational expression of political allegiance. The potential difficulties with this conception of peoplehood, however, stem from its lack of a sufficiently sturdy grounding for political allegiance. One might doubt whether rational calculation in and of itself provides a reliable source of political obligation and unity. Hobbes is well aware that, absent a powerful dose of fear, people are unlikely to keep their promises when it is no longer in their interest to do so, and his lengthy deductive proof of political obligation acknowledges an implicit tendency to disobey whenever it is advantageous for subjects. Something more robust than a covenant, instrumental reason, or “constitutional patriotism” is necessary to supply the degree of unity and social cohesion demanded by the Hobbesian political community.

The most likely candidate, then, is a nation where thick cultural symbols, deeply shared moral values and commitments, or what we today would call a “civil religion” stamp a group as one distinctive people. To be sure, Hobbes’s political community seems willing to accommodate – when absolutely necessary – a certain latitude of religious or cultural pluralism. But it is impossible to read Leviathan without a sense that these differences are to be minimized, wherever possible, and that the sovereign ought to do everything in its power to foster moral and cultural uniformity. Not just an empty formal equality, but also substantive likeness and cultural homogeneity lie at the very heart of Hobbes’s political project.

For this reason, as we have seen, Hobbes’s political theory ably illustrates the complex and dialectical relationship between peoplehood and popular sovereignty – with the former developing alongside the latter, both conceptually and historically. Hobbes’s version of popular sovereignty proves instructive insofar as it allows us to appreciate better the relationship between political democracy and cultural homogeneity, between populism and nationalism, and between the internal composition of political communities and their distinctiveness vis-à-vis other nations. These insights further reveal that popular sovereignty rests not on a single “fiction,” as Edmund Morgan suggested, but instead on multiple intersecting fictions: equality, homogeneity, majority rule, and the existence of distinct and identifiable peoples.

Introduction

The greatest challenge to liberal democracy today comes from political movements that in the name of democratic equality and popular sovereignty erode institutional checks on the exercise of power. Staying within formal electoral rules, parties and charismatic leaders seek to consolidate authority not only by contesting particular policies but also by attacking the very foundations of the constitutional order. Behind them stand publics that condone the assault on liberal norms, and welcome the possibility of a democratic regime that is non-liberal or expressly anti-liberal.Footnote ¹

While newly urgent, the rise of illiberal populist movements is not in itself new. Although triggered by specific conditions and catalyzed by the failures of the liberal order itself, the current assault on liberal democracy draws on century-old ideas. It reflects tensions and dilemmas that are constitutive of modern society. Comparing two influential accounts of these tensions – by Alexis de Tocqueville and Carl Schmitt – this chapter interrogates the meaning and ramifications of popular sovereignty in order to shed light on liberal democracy’s vulnerabilities and strengths, past and present.

Tocqueville is a canonical proponent of liberal constitutionalism, whose work has enjoyed a broad appeal across partisan and geopolitical divides.Footnote ² Schmitt’s reputation as liberalism’s “most brilliant critic” has made him the patron saint of radical critiques from the Left and the Right, in the East and the West.Footnote ³ Behind this sharp contrast, however, hide instructive similarities. Trained as jurists with philosophical bent and political ambitions, Tocqueville and Schmitt viewed popular sovereignty as the vital core of modern politics. Both accepted democracy as “irresistible” and “providential” in Tocqueville’s words, or in Schmitt’s as the “unavoidable destiny” of the modern world, and sought to discern its implications. Both wrote in circumstances of existential crisis: Schmitt in the context of interwar Germany and its “deeply contested” Weimar constitution; Tocqueville from the perspective of a France in the grip of ongoing revolution, and as a witness to the looming crisis of the American Union which, he surmised, was headed to a breaking point. Both looked back on 1789 and its aftershocks as modernity’s crucible in which each of their political visions were forged.

Alongside these affinities there was also a direct influence: Schmitt was an admiring reader of Tocqueville whose analysis deeply informed his own. Schmitt’s damning rebukes of liberalism – of individualism and the danger of depoliticization, of “pantheism” (or “immanentism”), and of the unprecedented dehumanization that modern society may give rise to – were powerfully anticipated by Tocqueville. Schmitt’s political-theological approach, too, has Tocquevillean resonances.Footnote ⁴

Most pertinently, Tocqueville and Schmitt both distinguished democracy from liberalism in order to shed light on the nature of what Schmitt termed “the political,” and on the stakes of modern politics. And herein, I argue, lies their fundamental disagreement. Distinguishing democracy from liberalism is a cornerstone of Schmitt’s constitutional theory that allows Schmitt to advocate dictatorship as a legitimate democratic form: an advocacy that culminated in his pledging allegiance to the National Socialist regime. Central to Tocqueville’s “conceptual system,” the tension between equality and freedom underpins his account of American democracy, and of the main challenges facing modern society.Footnote ⁵ While Schmitt insisted on differentiating liberalism from democracy in order to attack liberal norms and institutions, Tocqueville deployed the distinction to advance liberal self-understanding and guard against modern threats to freedom. If Schmitt is often invoked as the intellectual precursor of today’s detractors of liberal democracy, Tocqueville offers much needed resources to its defenders. Proceeding dialogically, this chapter argues that even when taken at face value, Schmitt’s critique of liberal-democratic politics fails on its own terms: It undermines the political rather than promoting it. In reconstructing a Tocquevillean response to Schmitt’s harsh critique, my aim is to turn this critique to liberal democracy’s advantage.

Liberalism and Democracy in Tocqueville

In Democracy in America Tocqueville proclaims democracy’s global rise. The principle of equality, he argues, has no viable alternative in the modern world. In the aftermath of the Atlantic revolutions and the defeat of aristocracy as a social system, the urgent question is no longer whether to have democracy but of what kind. Tocqueville called for, and pioneered, a “new political science” to guide this democratic quest.Footnote ⁶

Although democracy is “irresistible,” its outcome is not predetermined. Democracy’s social base and the passion for equality which, Tocqueville claimed, define the modern age are compatible with two very different political scenarios: one that postulates equal rights and freedoms, and another predicated on an omnipotent state that pursues equality by demanding the equal powerlessness of all. Freedom, in other words, is not a necessary outcome of democratization. With the demise of traditional social orders and regime types, and the ascendance of popular sovereignty as the modern legitimating principle, the fundamental political choice is between democratic self-rule and egalitarian despotism. These different possibilities represent two alternative global models, which Tocqueville famously identified with the United States and Russia.Footnote ⁷

Highlighting the tension between equality and freedom, Tocqueville traces this tension to two distinct dimensions of modern democracy – social equality and popular sovereignty – and to the illiberal potential each of them carries. Modern democracy for Tocqueville is premised on the moral equality of human beings. Not primarily a political concept, democracy is a “social state”: a condition of society where status is not fixed by birth but must be acquired. While social distinctions and hierarchies still exist, these are fluid and changeable. Democracy, in other words, connotes social mobility: the possibility of rising – and falling – on the social ladder. This in turn entails a way of seeing the human world that insists on fundamental similarity, and a peculiar mindset characterized by the “ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible” love of equality itself. Rather than a static arrangement, democracy is a “perpetual work in progress.” The motor of this progressive dynamic is the individuals’ desire to shape their own life.Footnote ⁸

In Tocqueville’s analysis, the drive to individual independence is both a central feature of democratic freedom and its foremost danger. A salutary check on pathological forms of collectivism, it also creates the conditions for atomization that undermine the social fabric. By encouraging a fixation on private interests and goals, individualism hides from view each person’s dependence upon and duty toward fellow citizens and society at large. It gives rise to solidarity deficits that, by weakening the shared trust in the institutional order, erode the moral preconditions of freedom. In times of hardship, the isolated individual would quickly discover the limits of his independence. Having lost ties to fellow citizens or the taste for seeking their support, begrudging the status of those who fare better, he would turn to the only agent that has retained uncontestable agency: the state. As Tocqueville warns, egalitarian societies are vulnerable to the rise of a specifically democratic form of despotism: an all-powerful, ever-expanding centralized government.Footnote ⁹

Prefacing the short chapter “On the Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America,” Tocqueville’s statement points to popular sovereignty as a pivotal aspect of American freedom, and to mores as crucial for sustaining it.Footnote ¹⁰ If equality is democracy’s social creed, its political principle is popular sovereignty. In its broadest meaning, popular sovereignty postulates that political institutions must be authorized by the people over whom they rule. While the moral equality of individuals grounds the idea of universal rights, the claim that the people is sovereign undergirds the liberal norm of rule by consent, and of government’s accountability to the governed. However, though integral to democratic liberty, popular sovereignty is not simply its guarantor. Like the passion for equality, it too can give rise to illiberal arrangements. Although legitimate rule requires popular consent, not all popular regimes are legitimate. After all, serving the people is what “schemers of all times and despots of all ages” have purported to do. Tocqueville warns that, as an abstract principle or ideological slogan, popular sovereignty lends itself to populist manipulation and to abusing rather than effecting the people’s will.Footnote ¹¹

In short, though a crucial element of a free democracy, popular sovereignty is not in itself liberal. Its liberal character depends on how this principle is institutionalized, and how popular support indispensable for the functioning of democratic institutions is generated and expressed. What distinguishes the United States – Tocqueville’s foremost example of a free democracy – is the comprehensive way popular sovereignty informs both the institutional arrangements and the citizens’ self-understanding.

Tocqueville depicts American institutions – from the direct democracy in the township, through the state governments, to the grand design of the Federal Union – as applications of the same popular principle “according to the necessity of the case.” He views the variety of institutional forms, direct and representative, spontaneous and established, as diverse embodiments of popular sovereignty. For all their differences, these institutions draw on the same legitimating source, the people, and answer to a single court: public opinion. They enable and channel popular participation. This is why, as one chapter heading has it, “It Can Be Strictly Said that in the United States It Is the People Who Govern.”Footnote ¹²

Tocqueville credits the intensely participatory character of American society with the “real advantages” of its democratic government: economic dynamism, public spirit, commitment to rights, and respect for law. Meddling in politics and the habits of engagement resulting from it enlighten political understanding. The people’s widespread perception of being in charge generates popular allegiance to democratic practices and constitutional norms. Without this broad-based allegiance, the balanced government mandated by the Constitution would remain a mere theory, and the Constitution itself “a dead letter.”Footnote ¹³

For Tocqueville, then, what makes the American polity liberal is its being robustly republican. The novelty of American democracy is the astonishing degree to which the popular principle has been “freed from all the fictions,” and the variety of ways in which citizens actually partake in public life. Beyond a legitimating myth or political slogan, Tocqueville stresses the reality of popular rule in the United States, and extrapolates from it a general prescription for liberal democracy.

To be free, a democratic people must find institutional ways to determine its own will rather than acquiesce in elite fabrications of that will. More than a constitutional Bill of Rights, the active exercise of those rights is the criterion that above all differentiates a free from an illiberal democracy. Freedom, in short, implies sovereignty, and the meaning of sovereignty is participation in ruling: a government, as Lincoln put it, of the people, for the people, and in crucial respects by the people as well.Footnote ¹⁴

And yet, as Tocqueville knew from the violent upheavals of the French Revolution, actualizing such a free democracy meets with great challenges.Footnote ¹⁵ Popular participation and the mobilization of civic passions that propel it are as much a danger to a free society as they may be its prerequisite. Holding up the new republic as empirical evidence for a robustly popular liberal-democratic regime, Democracy in America ruminates on the conditions of its possibility. Sifting through the factors that enable popular sovereignty in America, Tocqueville foregrounds the importance of mores which he defines as “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people.”Footnote ¹⁶

In the chapter “The Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States,” the longest in the book, Tocqueville ponders the durability of republican institutions and the future of the Union. As he argues, what sustains the democratic republic in America is the degree to which popular sovereignty has permeated all levels of social organization as well as ideas and practices and even religious beliefs. Not an empty abstraction, popular sovereignty recapitulates the daily workings of society.Footnote ¹⁷ And yet, while regarding the future of American republicanism with unshaken confidence, Tocqueville expresses prescient doubts about the longevity of the Federal Union. Calling attention to racial diversity and the challenges to integration, he highlights the intra-white differences as the most momentous threat to the Union’s existence. Long before Lincoln’s fateful speech, Tocqueville points to the divided house – half-free and half-slave – of the American Union as unlikely to long endure, notwithstanding the shared political culture and ethno-religious identity between the North and the South.Footnote ¹⁸ Differences in mores and way of life more than diverging material interests endangered the integrity and future of the federation. If the principle of popular sovereignty was the “the law of laws” of American democracy, who could belong to “We the People” was an open question on which hung the destiny and future of the United States.Footnote ¹⁹

In sum, Tocqueville praised the United States for the institutional imagination that allowed it to combine extended size with popular participation, social and institutional diversity with political unity. At the same time, he recognized the fragility of the Federal Union. Probing the contested character of American peoplehood, Tocqueville’s work highlights the dangers of popular rule, first signaled in the quasi-theological conclusion of the popular sovereignty chapter:

The people, Tocqueville suggests, is to democracy what God is to religion: its alpha and omega, its source and rationale. If faith in the people is indispensable for democratic government, how the people and its sovereignty are construed is critical for the possibility of free democracy. One set of dangers implied in this analogy issues from viewing the people as omnipotent: ruling godlike and in God’s place. As Tocqueville’s discussion of majority tyranny intimates, such a vision confuses the political good with the moral good, or the “sovereignty of the people” with “the sovereignty of the human race.” Canvassed in Democracy in America’s longest chapter, this dangerous confusion was most poignantly exemplified by the racial policies of the new republic that denied parts of its population not only social and political equality but their very humanity.Footnote ²¹

Yet, if one threat to democratic freedom consists in deifying the people and mobilizing difference to justify tyrannical exclusion, the other, explored in Democracy in America’s final chapters, stems from losing sight of meaningful differences, and of political agency and freedom. No longer bound by collective categories and civic membership, the citizens are reduced to an indiscriminate “crowd of similar and equal men,” each a stranger to the destiny of others, and to the idea of directing one’s own life. As political identities lose their meaning and legitimacy, so do existential alternatives. Self-rule gives way to a top-down governance that labors for the happiness of all by relieving each from “the trouble of thinking and the care of being.”Footnote ²²

Thinking through modernity’s dialectic of equality and difference and its evolution down the egalitarian road, Tocqueville worried that, were the former to prevail, it would succeed not in achieving actual universality but in effectively suppressing the contestation of universality and the quest for new ways to be human. More than the tyranny of particular formations or local outbreaks of illiberalism, the great threat Tocqueville’s work points to is a global discrediting of the sovereignty of peoples and of democratic politics as such.

Democracy Versus Liberalism in Carl Schmitt

If for Tocqueville democracy is first and foremost a social state, for Carl Schmitt, democracy “as correctly defined” is a state form that requires the identity of rulers and ruled.Footnote ²³ For the government to be a true expression of the governed – hence for the people’s sovereignty to be practically possible – government and people must share an existential orientation and far-reaching identity in values and ways of life. This in turn substantiates the “fundamental concept” of equality: not equality as an abstract principle but the “precise and substantial concept of equality” that serves to identify the members of the people and differentiates them from others.Footnote ²⁴

Schmitt construes democratic equality as similarity: “in particular similarity among the people.”Footnote ²⁵ His crucial point is that political equality entails inequality. For the concept of equality to define the “we” of a particular community it necessarily implies the “they” of those who do not belong. Equality so understood is a principle of exclusion as much as inclusion: It marks the border between us and them. What delineates the people is not only what “we” share but also what “we” stand against, or what separates “us” from others. The former cannot be fully grasped without the latter. Not only is political identity formed through contrast and juxtaposition with outsiders. This negative moment – the idea of an existential other – more than any positive content serves as a unifying force that holds the political order together.Footnote ²⁶ Pointing to the democratic imperative to foster a people “individualized through a politically distinctive consciousness,” Schmitt leaves open the question of how this should be done. What constitutes a legitimate criterion of inclusion or exclusion is context specific. It is a political and historical not a moral let alone a scientific question.Footnote ²⁷

Schmitt famously defines the political through the distinction between friend and enemy. The enemy in his sense need not be evil: “it is enough that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.”Footnote ²⁸ While Schmitt intends his understanding of the political to apply to various groupings including parties and associations, he singles out the state as the authoritative entity that comprehends and subordinates all others. The political understood as the most intense existential distinction crystallizes in international relations and in the antagonism between peoples.

Democratic equality, then, consists in a broadly shared view of what defines the body politic and differentiates its way of life from that of other polities. Just as equality presupposes inequality, so too a political community – a people – is premised on the plurality of peoples and on the presence of differences that help constitute one society’s vision of equality.

Whereas democracy for Schmitt rests on equality politically understood, liberalism by contrast is an “individualistic-humanitarian … Weltanschauung.” Championing “general human equality” and universal rights, liberalism aspires, or seems to aspire, to a “democracy of mankind.” In extending its principles to all of humanity, liberalism undermines the political by robbing equality of its constitutive distinctions, thus of its particular meaning and value.Footnote ²⁹

Schmitt critiques the notion of general human equality as a vague universalist ethic devoid of political substance. Based on a formal or minimalist understanding of humanity, it is a critical tool rather than a juridical concept. The idea of universal humanity was deployed by the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to dislodge the moral and legal assumptions underlying the corporate order of feudal society. While useful for attacking social distinctions and “institutions that no longer have validity in themselves,” human equality, in Schmitt’s view, is not a constructive concept. Admitting its efficacy as an instrument of social critique, Schmitt denies that it has positive content that could inform constitutional law.Footnote ³⁰

In other words, while democracy as a political form necessarily differentiates between citizen and alien, due to its individualistic and humanitarian commitments, liberalism is ideologically unable to articulate such a distinction. Liberalism, Schmitt charges, cannot sustain a political community because it cannot define its boundaries. The liberal state thus depends on prerequisites it cannot itself guarantee. What is more, by calling into question political identities and borders, it actively undermines its own legitimacy.

This, however, does not mean that liberalism is apolitical or unaware of its politics. In fact, behind the pretended universalism of liberal norms hide political and economic interests that strive for global domination. Debunking “the concept of humanity” as an “ideological instrument of imperialist expansion and … vehicle of economic imperialism,” Schmitt indicts liberalism with hypocrisy. Glossing over the fact that constitutional principles and liberal rights are only viable within a political framework adopted by a particular people, liberalism’s universalist pretensions militate against both national particularity and the pluralism they pretend to espouse. In this way liberalism’s fake universality facilitates imperialist overreach. Paradoxically, it also promotes dehumanization. By seeking to “confiscate” and “monopolize” what it means to be human, the liberal claim to represent all of humanity ends up denying the humanity of those who beg to differ.Footnote ³¹

Liberalism thus leads to what Schmitt diagnoses as the triple crisis of modernity: “first of all to a crisis of democracy itself, because the problem of substantial equality and homogeneity, which is necessary for democracy, cannot be resolved by the general equality of mankind”; next, the crisis of the modern state that rests on democratic legitimation; and, finally, the crisis of parliamentary institutions.Footnote ³²

In 1926 Schmitt claims that the rise of Bolshevism and Fascism is but a symptom of this triple crisis, whose root cause is the “confused combination” of liberalism and democracy (Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 13). His strategy for addressing these crises is to argue for the historical necessity of divorcing democracy from liberalism. To this end, Schmitt engages in a two-prong deconstruction. One line of attack is to lay bare liberalism’s historically specific, Anglo-American character. Liberal institutions, in Schmitt’s view, belong to a particular cultural tradition with its own metaphysical and ethical assumptions – foremost among them liberal individualism.

Exposing liberalism’s Anglo-American origins as a point of consensus between the liberal, the Catholic, and the left-radical perspectives, Schmitt suggests that, though claiming universal validity, liberal humanitarianism is in fact a historically situated (and therefore contestable) vision.Footnote ³⁴

Along with historicizing liberal norms, Schmitt’s second line of attack is to insist on the class-based character of what he calls the Bourgeois Rechtsstaat. Following Marx, Schmitt portrays liberalism as the ideology of the bourgeoisie and its self-understanding as a meritocracy of wealth and education. While the bourgeoisie’s historic ascent was propelled by its alliance with democratic forces that lent popular legitimacy to its struggle against monarchical absolutism, “since about 1848” liberalism has found itself in an intensifying opposition to democracy.Footnote ³⁵

Schmitt maintains that the culture of robust deliberation that characterized liberal parliamentarism at its nineteenth-century zenith was achieved by excluding certain classes and opinions from political representation. Probing parliamentarism’s intellectual justifications, first among them its capacity to effect political education and rational policymaking, Schmitt judges “the arguments of Burke, Bentham, Guizot and John Stuart Mill [as] antiquated today.” Whatever their intrinsic merits, the rise of modern mass democracy has eroded the preconditions for, and the viability of, institutions “constructed on the English model.” As a result, “the distinction between liberal parliamentary ideas and mass democratic ideas cannot remain unnoticed any longer.” Torn between a liberal individualism, “burdened by moral pathos, and a democratic sentiment governed essentially by political ideals,” liberal democracy, Schmitt insists, must decide between its elements. Embracing democracy’s “unavoidable destiny,” leaves no choice but to jettison liberalism.Footnote ³⁶

For Schmitt, then, liberalism and democracy have come into an irreconcilable contradiction. By driving a conceptual wedge between them, Schmitt clears the way for the institutional setting Tocqueville most dreaded: dictatorship. He does so ostensibly in order to salvage a political understanding of democracy – and with it, a pluralistic global order – from the imperialist ramifications of Anglo-American liberalism: an aspiration the Orbans, Putins, and Xi Jinpings (and, ironically, also the Trumps) of our time have made their own.

Popular Sovereignty and the Political: Schmitt Versus Tocqueville

As we have seen, Schmitt equates liberalism with humanitarian universalism which he contrasts with democracy’s people-specific character. Highlighting the contradictions between universalist liberalism and particularist democracy as the root cause of modernity’s crisis, he insists on resolving these contradictions by separating universal from particular, and (humanitarian) ethics from politics.

Contrasting with Schmitt’s attempt to draw a clear line between liberalism and democracy, for Tocqueville the distinction is both all-embracing and ambiguous. In his view, modern democracy rests on two principles: on universal equality that pushes against social distinctions; and on popular sovereignty, that is, the ideal of political self-rule which requires a particular community – a people – and a notion of rule or sovereignty. Democracy cannot be liberal if either of those principles is missing but their combination generates recurring tensions and policy dilemmas. Liberalism, then, is both particularistic and universalist. While espousing universal moral aims, it is premised on a respectful regard for the historical experience of particular peoples, and on the moral bonds that underpin and enable community’s existence.Footnote ³⁷

Viewing democracy and liberalism differently, Tocqueville and Schmitt agree that they are conceptually distinct, and that clarifying this distinction is necessary to guard against the inherent ills that threaten modern polities. They also partly concur on the source of those ills: the erosion of political identities and of the civic dimension of social life. Tocqueville and Schmitt both recoil from the prospect of a world without politics and agency – a world in which humanity is reduced to a “herd of industrious animals,” and where the application of rules and the administration of things have replaced the government of persons.Footnote ³⁸ Both maintain that to prevent this dystopic world, sustaining diverse visions of democratic peoplehood is a sine qua non.

Where they fundamentally disagree is how to achieve this, and whether liberal institutions help or hinder. While for Tocqueville liberal constitutionalism grounded in individual rights and supportive of active participation in sovereignty is integral to the solution, for Schmitt it is the problem itself. The issue between them partly concerns the status of liberal norms: whether these norms are based on correct conclusions of a “new political science” or, rather, on value-laden and historically specific assumptions that should not be imitated if pluralism and diversity – hence political sovereignty – are to be preserved. Schmitt views either option as problematic. If value neutral, liberal institutions are “practical-technical means” of soulless political technology that cannot foster the authentic life of a community or reflect its specific circumstances. If, on the other hand, liberal principles rest on a particular metaphysical foundation, adopting them would be synonymous with “an act of self-subjection to an alien people” that is antithetical to popular sovereignty.Footnote ³⁹

In Political Theology Schmitt canvases the historic rise of modern democracy as the transition from monarchical sovereignty grounded in a vision of transcendent Creator to popular sovereignty that “centers on ideas of immanence.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Citing Tocqueville’s claim that the people, ruling godlike over the political world, are “the cause and the end of all things” Schmitt illustrates the nineteenth-century moment in this development when the people were assumed to speak with God’s voice if not yet to replace it. Presenting popular sovereignty as a secularized theological concept, Schmitt surveys its sociological determinants. He argues that dictatorship is not merely compatible with democratic legitimation but may well be the only way to restore a notion of transcendence – hence of sovereignty and the political – in a democratic age.Footnote ⁴¹

In Schmitt’s Tocqueville-informed account, “the dominant concept of legitimacy today is in fact democratic.” As a result, all legitimate claims to authority rest on popular consent. If there still are monarchies, there is hardly a monarch who would dare disregard public opinion. With the emergence of popular sovereignty as the only legitimating principle, differences between modern regimes concern “the creation and shaping of popular will”: that is, how to generate and sustain an authoritative identification of a particular group as the people.Footnote ⁴²

Sovereignty, then, depends on how the people’s identity is construed, and on the capacity to achieve such an identity. Schmitt famously defines the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception.”Footnote ⁴³ In his account, the moment of crisis, which demands decisive action outside legal norms and procedures, effectively reveals the organ of sovereignty. It also makes plain that the law is not self-sufficient but requires decision and a social context or “homogenous medium” to uphold it. The decision brings this medium to light not least by drawing a bright line between friend and enemy. By substantiating the content of democratic equality, it unifies the people.Footnote ⁴⁴

As Lars Vinx has pointed out, Schmitt’s rhetoric notwithstanding, it would be wrong to view the sovereign decision simply as a top-down imposition of authority. For it to be successful and viewed as legitimate, “the decision must express some widely shared substantive identity which is prior to the law and to the state as a legal expression of community.” This identity becomes political when – and only when – a critical mass of the people agrees to “fight and die” in its defense. Sovereign, in final account, is not “he who decides” but they who embrace that decision.Footnote ⁴⁵

If sovereignty connotes political unity and a broadly shared “we,” Schmitt denies that such unified identity can be attained through parliamentary politics or practices of self-rule, due to the fragmentation these entail.Footnote ⁴⁶ Reeling from the political impasse of the Weimar Republic, he points to factionalism as democracy’s main problem, which parliamentary institutions both express and aggravate. By pluralizing and constraining the exercise of political power, parliamentarism occludes the locus and true meaning of sovereignty.

For Schmitt, in other words, the functioning of parliamentary democracy presupposes an underlying consensus it is unable to produce. If in the nineteenth century, an era of limited suffrage, this consensus could be sustained by restricting political rights to the few and excluding the many from direct representation, under the conditions of mass democracy this “liberal” solution is no longer feasible. By proclaiming the universality of political rights, the Bourgeois Rechtsstaat, as Marx put it, “stifles its own prerequisites.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Henceforth, the way to popular legitimation and democratic sovereignty must be sought not in parliamentary deliberations but in culture wars that divide friend from foe and prepare (as Schmitt’s works have done) the acceptance of dictatorial unity. In Dyzenhaus’ words, “the struggle for sovereignty, the struggle to be the one who decides, is won not in the reasoned debates of parliamentary politics but in the battles of the politics of identity,” and on the battlefield of public opinion.Footnote ⁴⁸

To repeat, Schmitt predicates a robust political identity on the presence and potential antagonism of existential others. While political antagonisms can be internal, the state “encompasses and relativizes all these antitheses.” So “the political” par excellence is embodied in national unity, and revealed in the relations between diverse peoples. Ironically, sustaining pluralism and the political on an interstate level requires their suppression within the nation state. Heterogeneity abroad is premised on homogeneity at home.Footnote ⁴⁹ Separating liberalism from democracy thus allows Schmitt to advocate fostering homogeneous democratic peoplehood through “the elimination [Vernichtung] and eradication of heterogeneity” that stands in manifest opposition to liberal norms and practices. Rooted in a pessimistic vision of modernity, Schmitt’s anti-liberal polemics paved the way for the depredations of the National Socialist regime.Footnote ⁵⁰

Tocqueville dedicates his life’s work to repudiating the kind of dark conclusions Schmitt embraced, viewing them as a threat intrinsic to modern democracy:

Democracy in America reads as an extended refutation of what Schmitt dubs the “Jacobin argument”: that popular will could be legitimately expressed by a select body or single organ which authoritatively defines society’s identity and interests.Footnote ⁵² To rebut this argument, Tocqueville describes Jacksonian America, an actually existing popular state where mass democracy, which Schmitt saw arising in twentieth-century Europe, was to an unprecedented extent already a reality. Tocqueville holds up the United States as an example of a free democracy that reveals both the promise and hazards of popular sovereignty in the modern world. As “the most democratic country on earth,” American society, Tocqueville claimed, teaches lessons that are universally instructive. If Schmitt’s constitutionalism foreswears imitation and importing foreign wisdom, Tocqueville wagers that, if judiciously adapted, liberal norms and Anglo-American practices would protect rather than efface national specificity and human diversity.Footnote ⁵³

Tocqueville regards the individualistic erosion of the political as an inherently modern danger. By breaking the hierarchical bonds that held traditional societies together, democracy encourages withdrawal from politics, and makes the forced imposition of social unity both a real possibility and a standing temptation. Not only is individualism democratic rather than liberal as Schmitt averred. In Tocqueville’s account, a Schmitt-like dictatorial solution is bound to deepen the problem of individual self-isolation, not resolve it. Far from sustaining “the political,” dictatorship undermines it by radically shrinking the citizens’ understanding and political know-how. Inimical to minorities, it is no less debilitating for the majority in whose name it is exercised. By denying the greater part of the citizenry meaningful participation in public life, dictatorship robs both leaders and people of practical experience as well as the intellectual and moral virtues necessary for politics.Footnote ⁵⁴

While Schmitt postulates the need for a homogenous national identity crafted and, if need be, violently imposed by the state, for Tocqueville top-down, tyrannical cohesion is as problematic as the recurring identity crisis to which modern polities are prone. And so, where Schmitt foregrounds one problem, that of fragmentation, Tocqueville characteristically sees two. In his account, a coercive unity is as conducive to political decline as radical individualism. Indeed, the two are locked in a dialectic embrace. For Tocqueville, the only effective way to combat depoliticization is not by conjuring up a mighty sovereign and foisting a collective identity on a dazzled people, but by finding ways to involve individuals and groups in shared deliberation and the search for self-definition that will hone their political judgment. The political can only be defended and democratic sovereignty sustained by institutions and practices that actively engage the citizens at large in shaping popular will.

This, Tocqueville well understood, is not without challenges. As argued above, for Tocqueville popular sovereignty in its strongest and most precise sense means broad-based participation in ruling. It requires a diversity of institutions that make this participation possible. Extrapolating from the American experience, Tocqueville argues for the crucial importance of civic associations for democracy. He praises American civic practices as schools of politics – “always open” – that help transform isolated individuals into dedicated citizens. Associations offer a direct experience and ongoing reminder of the political nature of institutions and norms, and teach the “art” needed to maintain them.Footnote ⁵⁵

However, even while advocating a pluralistic public sphere based on vigorous civil society and competitive political process, Tocqueville (like Schmitt) points to the need for underlying unity. In a polity where the only source of public authority is popular will represented by a national majority, eliciting such a majority and acquiescence in its decrees are crucial for democratic stability, and for society’s very existence. Without the recognition of and voluntary compliance with the majority view, there can be no self-governing community but rather a part dominating the whole. In order for the greater number not to oppress and the smaller not to be oppressed (or vice versa), they must share a sense of belonging to and benefiting from the constitutional order. For democratic contestation not to spiral into deepening polarization or civil war, contestation must be checked and balanced by a shared allegiance to “We the People.”

An egalitarian political system, in short, rests on a foundation of similitude or what Tocqueville calls “homogeneity of civilization.”Footnote ⁵⁶ It was the lack of such a homogeneity, and the pressure of profound differences between the American North and South that prompted Tocqueville to question the longevity of the antebellum Union. If institutional and moral pluralism is desirable, it is so up to the point where it compromises the possibility of unity. To be viable and free, democracy needs to form, as the American motto has it, unity out of plurality and, conversely, foster plurality in unity. Where Schmitt posits an either/or, Tocqueville argues that too much of either undermines the political.

In Tocqueville’s view, moreover, defining political membership and the identity of the people is a work in progress. The inherent tensions between individual rights and majority rule, between national particularity and universal humankind ensure that popular identity remains a zone of democratic contestation. Democratic peoplehood and the sovereignty based on it cannot be decided once and for all. Far from limited to a single constitutive event, securing popular commitment to “We the People” and to the institutional frame is a recurring need. For Tocqueville, then, defending popular sovereignty and the political is an ongoing task and a two-front struggle: against individualistic erosion of civic allegiance and against the inherent perils of authoritarian populism.

Implications

Many people today across the political spectrum are drawn to Schmitt as a reaction against a perceived democratic decline and loss of political agency. Schmitt persuades them that “liberalism” is the root cause of that decline, and opens them (as he once opened his countrymen) to dangerous ideas about dictatorship and about redrawing geopolitical borders. As this chapter argued, Tocqueville offers a different way of understanding current discontents and points us toward a different set of remedies. If today’s opponents of liberal democracy draw liberally on Schmitt, its defenders have much to gain from Tocqueville’s ideas.

Seen through the lens of Tocqueville, our current crisis is propelled by the clash between democracy’s two dimensions: equality and self-rule. While the passion for equality evokes a sentiment of universal similitude, popular sovereignty bespeaks a particular solidarity based on shared history and a distinctive political experience. The gap between universalist principle and particularist practice appears as an affront to democratic sensibilities. Heightened to the point of impasse by current debates about immigration and by the ravages of economic globalization, this gap is a source of profound psychological and moral tensions: tensions that, as Tocqueville predicted, would grow more unbearable the more equal we become.Footnote ⁵⁷ If Tocqueville’s diagnosis is correct, our illiberal moment is an instance of a dynamic that is inscribed in democratic life. How modern democracies navigate this inherent dynamic is critical for the future of democratic freedom. This, in turn, crucially depends on how the people and its sovereignty are being defined and institutionalized.

To be liberal, a popular regime must nurture broad participation in the quest for self-definition. Participation requires the existence of diverse institutional settings, formal and informal, that elicit civic contributions of different kinds. For their part, participatory practices help produce social trust and broad-based identification both with the institutional arrangement, and with the norms that underpin political life. However, the allegiance forged by the variety of local and interest-based communities, or even by nation-wide associations such as political parties may not easily translate to the polity as a whole. Indeed, the stronger those local and partisan ties, the more polarizing they can become. As Tocqueville witnessed in antebellum United States, and Sheri Berman has shown in the example of Weimar Germany, under certain conditions vigorous civil society can deepen solidarity deficits, and compromise democratic stability. These analyses suggest that, alongside grassroot initiatives and popular movements there is a need for comprehensive narratives that weave the plurality of civic experiences into the larger, multicolor whole that is a democratic people.Footnote ⁵⁸

As Rogers Smith argues in this volume, populist success can be studied to devise strategies for liberal recovery. What populists have to offer is not only an outlet for frustration or policy proposals, but also compelling stories of popular identity and rule. These are democratic stories affirming the dignity of the people against conniving elites or impersonal forces, and explaining how sovereignty can be restored and the political system revamped to serve those it is supposed to be serving. Not simply rejecting such stories but telling better – more complex and liberal ones – is, Smith contends, a way to combat illiberal populism.

In a like spirit, Harvard historian Jill Lepore has issued a clarion call to fellow historians to make the nation central to their craft again. She points out that, while academic historians may have graduated from telling national stories to painting global tableaus, democratic publics have not. These publics see and feel the world in terms of nations, and look for narratives that reflect and instruct their experience: “They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will.”Footnote ⁵⁹ If democratic freedom hinges on how the people is understood, much depends on whether those most qualified to inform this understanding take up the task.

In sum, the confidence in liberal democracy has to be built and rebuilt both from below and from above. It relies on the citizens’ practice and experience, and on the elite’s willingness to interpret this experience in a meaningful light and to provide narratives that bridge the distance between individuals and institutions, majority and minorities, people and elites. To be free, then, democracy requires both public participation and astute political and moral leadership – a leadership for which, I suggest, Tocqueville’s work serves as a resource and example.