Popular Sovereignty, Democracy and the Constituent Power

Abstract

The concept of sovereignty is today seriously challenged. Contemporary critics of sovereigntyhave focused on its hierarchical, unitary, discretionary, and arbitrary attributes.Hence, sovereign power is treated as anachronistic and dangerous, the cause of the manywrongs that have marked modern politics. This paper seeks to defend the notion and practiceof sovereignty as inherently democratic. The argument begins with and relies on thehistorical observation that the idea of sovereignty as supreme command corresponds tomerely one definition among several to be proposed and acted on in the long history ofthis term. An alternative definition can be traced to the writings of several modern politicaland constitutional thinkers, for whom sovereignty was understood not as the ultimatecoercive power of command but instead as the power to found, to posit, to constitute, thatis, as a constituting power. It is this alternative conceptualization of the sovereign as constituentpower that this article excavates and recovers as a more attractive and relevantform of popular sovereignty, more attuned to the emancipatory and egalitarian promisesof a normative theory of democracy.