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{{redirect|Sovereign people|the Curaçaoan political party|Sovereign People}}
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{{Short description|Idea that the people are the source of all power}}
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'''Popular sovereignty''' is the ] that the ]s of a ] and its ] are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political legitimacy. Popular sovereignty, being a principle, does not imply any particular political implementation.<ref group="lower-alpha">Leonard Levy notes of the "doctrine" of popular sovereignty that it "relates primarily not to the Constitution's operation but to its source of authority and supremacy, ratification, amendment, and possible abolition" (Tarcov 1986, v. 3, p. 1426).</ref> ] expressed the concept when he wrote that "In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns".<ref name="Franklin2003">{{cite book |author=Benjamin Franklin |title=The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mOEjB0Pdq8oC&pg=PA398 |year=2003 |publisher=Edited by Ralph Ketchum; Hackett Publishing |page=398|isbn=0872206831 }}</ref>
{{liberalism}}
'''Popular sovereignty''' or the '''sovereignty of the people''' is the belief that the legitimacy of the ] is created by the will or ], who are the source of all ]. It is closely associated to the ] philosophers, among whom are ], ] and ]. It is often contrasted with the concept of ].


==Origins==
] expressed the concept when he wrote, "In free governments the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns."<ref></ref>
{{Republicanism sidebar}}
{{Nationalism sidebar}}
{{Refimprove|date=May 2024}}
In '']'', ] advocated a form of republicanism that views the people as the only legitimate source of political authority. Sovereignty lies with the people, and the people should elect, correct, and, if necessary, depose its political leaders.<ref>Alan Gewirth, "Marsilius of Padua", in Paul Edwards, ed., ''The Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', vol. 5. New York: Macmillan, 1967, p. 167.</ref>


Popular sovereignty in its modern sense is an idea that dates to the ] school represented by ] (1588–1679), ] (1632–1704), and ] (1712–1778). Rousseau authored a book titled '']'', a prominent political work that highlighted the idea of the "]". The central tenet of popular sovereignty is that the ] of a government's ] and of its ] is based on the ]. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all held that individuals enter into a social contract, voluntarily giving up some of their natural freedom, so as to secure protection from the dangers inherent in the freedom of others. Whether men are seen as naturally more prone to ] and ] (Hobbes) or to ] and ] (Rousseau), the idea that a legitimate social order emerges only when ] and ] are equal among citizens binds the social contract thinkers to the concept of popular sovereignty.
==American Historical Context==


An earlier development of the theory of popular sovereignty is found among the ] (see e.g. ] (1483–1546) or ] (1548–1617)). Like the theorists of the ] and Locke, the Salamancans saw sovereignty as emanating originally from ]. However, unlike the divine right theorists and in agreement with Locke, they saw it as passing from God to all people equally, not only to ]s.
The application of the doctrine of popular sovereignty receives particular emphasis in the American historical context. In describing how Americans attempted to apply this doctrine prior to the territorial struggle over slavery that led to the Civil War, political scientist Donald S. Lutz noted the variety of American applications:<blockquote>To speak of popular sovereignty is to place ultimate authority in the people. There are a variety of ways in which sovereignty may be expressed. It may be immediate in the sense that the people make the law themselves, or mediated through representatives who are subject to election and recall; it may be ultimate in the sense that the people have a negative or veto over legislation, or it may be something much less dramatic. In short, popular sovereignty covers a multitude of institutional possibilities. In each case, however, popular sovereignty assumes the existence of some form of popular consent, and it is for this reason that every definition of republican government implies a theory of consent.<ref>Donald S. Lutz, ''Popular Consent and Popular Control: Whig Political Theory in the Early State Constitutions'' (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980) at p. 38 ISBN 978-0807105962 Additional support for the centrality of popular sovereignty include: Ronald M. Peters, Jr., ''The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: A Social Compact'' (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1978) p.1 ISBN 978-0807115060 (suggests the following as embodying the meaning of popular sovereignty for Americans - "The concept of popular sovereignty holds simply that in a society organized for political action, the will of the people as a whole is the only right standard of political action."); Donald S. Lutz, ''The Origins of American Constitutionalism'' (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1988) ISBN 978-0807115060 (suggests that popular sovereignty came to have meaning in “the way Americans viewed themselves as a people. They firmly believed that on their own authority they could form themselves into a community, create or replace a government to order their community, select and replace those who hold government office, determine which values bind them as a community and thus which values should guide them those in government when making decisions for the community, and replace political institutions at variance with these values."); Joel H. Silbey, ed., ''Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System'' (3 vols., Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994) ISBN 978-0684192437 (entry for "Constitutional Conventions," Vol. I, p. 37, states "The justification of the American Revolution and republican government--as opposed to the monarchical forms of government in Europe--rested on the theory of popular sovereignty. In essence, that theory established the basic premise of American political life: the ultimate and sole legitimacy of government rests on the consent of 'the people.' Defining 'the people' became one of the central issues in the development of the American experience, but soon after declaring independence, American revolutionaries came to agree that popular sovereignty underlay America's republican governments. If identifying 'the people' and their role in changing government took many decades, the problem of how to locate popular sovereignty was solved relatively quickly by the institutional device of the constitutional convention.")</ref></blockquote>


]s and ] are theoretically based on popular sovereignty. However, a legalistic notion of popular sovereignty does not necessarily imply an effective, functioning ]. A ] or even an individual ] may claim to represent the will of the people and rule in its name, which would be congruent with Hobbes's view on the subject. Most modern definitions present democracy as a necessary condition of popular sovereignty.
===The Sovereignty of the People and the American Revolution===
The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. With their Revolution, Americans substituted the sovereignty in the person of the English king, George III, with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Henceforth, American revolutionaries by and large agreed and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people. <ref>Paul K. Conkin, ''Self-Evident Truths: Being a Discourse on the Origins & Development of the First Principles of American Government—Popular Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and Balance & Separation of Powers '' (Indiana Univ. Press, 1974), 52 ISBN 9780253201980 (describing “the almost unanimous acceptance of popular sovereignty at the level of abstract principle”); Edmund S. Morgan, “The Problem of Popular Sovereignty,” in ''Aspects of American Liberty: Philosophical, Historical and Political'' (The American Philosophical Society, 1977), 101 (concluding the American Revolution “confirmed and completed the subordination of government to the will of the people”); Willi Paul Adams, ''The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era'' (University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 137 ISBN 978-0742520691 (asserting that statements of the “principle” of the people’s sovereignty “expressed the very heart of the consensus among the victors of 1776”).</ref>


Judge ] called the notion that governments are the creation of the consent of its people "ridiculous", as "the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Mayall |first1=James |editor1-last=Breuilly |editor1-first=John |title=The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism |date=2013 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford | isbn=978-0-19-876820-3 | page=542 | chapter=International Society, State Sovereignty, and National Self-Determination}}</ref>
This idea—often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed—was not invented by the American revolutionaries. Rather, the consent of the governed and the idea of the people as a sovereign source had earlier intellectual roots in English history and even earlier. <ref>On the English origins of the sovereignty of the people and consent as the basis of government, see John Phillip Reid, ''Constitutional History of the American Revolution'' (4 vols., University of Wisconsin Press, 1986-1993), Vol. III:97-101, 107-10 ISBN 0-299-13070-3 ; Edmund S. Morgan, ''Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America'' (W.W. Norton and Company, 1988) ISBN 0393306232</ref>


==United States==
The American contribution lay in what they did with the idea that the people were the sovereign—how they struggled with and put that idea into practice. Before the American Revolution, few examples existed of a people deliberately creating their own governments. Most people in the world experienced governments as an inheritance—whether monarchies or expressions of raw power. <ref>Gordon S. Wood, ''The Radicalism of the American Revolution'' (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 243 ISBN 978-0679736882 (noting that during their Revolution, Americans “became the first society in the modern world to bring ordinary people into the affairs of government—not just as voters but as actual rulers”); Pauline Maier, ''American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence'' (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 34-35 ISBN 978-0679779087 (observing that in 1776 no governments existed “in which all authority rested on popular choice”).</ref>
{{main|Popular sovereignty in the United States}}
The application of the doctrine of popular sovereignty receives particular emphasis in American history, notes historian Christian G. Fritz's ''American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War'', a study of the early history of American constitutionalism.<ref name="Fritz">Christian G. Fritz, (], 2008) at p. 290, 400. {{ISBN|978-0-521-88188-3}}</ref> In describing how Americans attempted to apply this doctrine prior to the territorial struggle over slavery that led to the Civil War, political scientist Donald S. Lutz noted the variety of American applications:


{{quote|To speak of popular sovereignty is to place ultimate authority in the people. There are a variety of ways in which sovereignty may be expressed. It may be immediate in the sense that the people make the law themselves, or mediated through representatives who are subject to election and recall; it may be ultimate in the sense that the people have a negative or veto over legislation, or it may be something much less dramatic. In short, popular sovereignty covers a multitude of institutional possibilities. In each case, however, popular sovereignty assumes the existence of some form of popular consent, and it is for this reason that every definition of republican government implies a theory of consent.|Donald S. Lutz<ref>Lutz 1980, p. 38</ref><ref name=centrality-of-popular-sovereignty group=lower-alpha/>
What underscored the excitement surrounding the creation of constitutions establishing governments in America after Independence was the fact that Americans deliberately and self-consciously created governments at one single moment explicitly relying on the authority of the sovereignty of the people (or “popular sovereignty”).
}}
Having relied upon the people as the collective sovereign to establish their first state constitutions (and later the Federal constitution), numerous questions remained for Americans to answer. What did a collective sovereign mean? How did one recognize the voice or expression of that collective sovereign and in what ways could that collective sovereign act? Americans struggled and contested over the answers to these questions from the time they declared Independence to the eve of the Civil War. During this period the idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union.<ref>This is the conclusion reached in Christian G. Fritz, ''American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War'' (Cambridge University Press, 2008) ISBN 978-0-521-88188-3 (In the prologue to this study, Fritz notes “In framing America’s first constitutions, patriots celebrated the people’s sovereignty. These ideas smoldered even after the Revolution ended and this heated revolutionary rhetoric soon permeated all regions and ranks of society. Government was no longer something that happened to people. In America it now became something the people – by their consent and volition – brought into being. The people gave their consent through their conduct and their active participation reinforced the message that the people were America’s new sovereign." However, “Americans argued fiercely about the nature and the extent of their power as part of the collective sovereign, and seven decades later they were no closer to agreement over what the people's sovereignty meant than they were during the Revolution.”) </ref>


The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. American revolutionaries aimed to substitute the sovereignty in the person of ], with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Thenceforth, American revolutionaries generally agreed with and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people.<ref name=sovereignty-of-the-people group=lower-alpha/> This was often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed—the idea of the people as a sovereign—and had clear 17th- and 18th-century intellectual roots in English history.<ref>On the English origins of the sovereignty of the people and consent as the basis of government, see: Reid 1986–1993, v. III, pp. 97–101, 107–110; Morgan 1988, passim</ref>
===Emergence of Perjorative American Connotation of “Popular Sovereignty”===
As the sectional crisis in the United States brought Americans towards the brink of the Civil War, the use of the term popular sovereignty eventually developed a pejorative connotation during the debate over whether slavery should be permitted in the western territories. The term “popular sovereignty” became part of the rhetoric of the argument for leaving it up to residents of the American territories whether or not to accept or reject slavery, also leaving it to these residents to answer the controversy over expansion of slavery in the United States <ref>The historical treatment of this controversy is extensive. A useful starting point for examining the concept of popular sovereignty as a potential solution to the controversy over the expansion of slavery, see Willard Carl Klunder, ‘’Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation’’ (Kent State University Press, 1996), 168-70, 177-80, 241-43. ISBN 978-0873385367</ref>


==References== ===1850s===
{{main|Origins of the American Civil War|Kansas–Nebraska Act}}
{{Refimprove|date=February 2008}}
In the 1850s, in the run-up to the Civil War, Northern Democrats led by Senator ] of Michigan and ] of Illinois promoted popular sovereignty as a middle position on the slavery issue. It said that actual residents of territories should be able to decide by voting whether or not slavery would be allowed in the territory. The federal government did not have to make the decision, and by appealing to democracy, Cass and Douglas hoped they could finesse the question of support for or opposition to slavery. Douglas applied popular sovereignty to Kansas in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed Congress in 1854.
{{Reflist}}<references/>

The Act had two unexpected results. By dropping the ] of 1820 under which said slavery would never be allowed in Kansas, it was a major boost for the expansion of slavery. Overnight, outrage united anti-slavery forces across the North into an "anti-Nebraska" movement that soon was institutionalized as the ], with its firm commitment to stop the expansion of slavery.

Also, pro- and anti-slavery elements moved into Kansas with the intention of allowing or banning slavery, which led to a raging state-level civil war, known as "]". ] targeted popular sovereignty in the ] of 1858, which left Douglas in a position that alienated Southern pro-slavery Democrats, who considered him weak in his support of slavery. The Southern Democrats broke with the party and ran their own candidate against Lincoln and Douglas in 1860.<ref>Childers 2011, pp. 48–70</ref>


==See also== ==See also==
* ]
* ] * ]
* ]
* ]
* ] * ]
* ] * ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]

==Notes==
{{reflist|group=lower-alpha |refs=
<ref name=centrality-of-popular-sovereignty>Additional support for the centrality of popular sovereignty include:
* Ronald M. Peters, Jr., suggests the following as embodying the meaning of popular sovereignty for Americans – "The concept of popular sovereignty holds simply that in a society organized for political action, the will of the people as a whole is the only right standard of political action" (Peters, Jr. 1978, p. 1);
* Donald S. Lutz suggests that popular sovereignty came to have meaning in "the way Americans viewed themselves as a people. They firmly believed that on their own authority they could form themselves into a community, create or replace a government to order their community, select and replace those who hold government office, determine which values bind them as a community and thus which values should guide them those in government when making decisions for the community, and replace political institutions at variance with these values" (Lutz 1980, p.&nbsp;10);
* ], states "The justification of the American Revolution and republican government—-as opposed to the monarchical forms of government in Europe—rested on the theory of popular sovereignty. In essence, that theory established the basic premise of American political life: the ultimate and sole legitimacy of government rests on the consent of 'the people.' Defining 'the people' became one of the central issues in the development of the American experience, but soon after declaring independence, American revolutionaries came to agree that popular sovereignty underlay America's republican governments. If identifying 'the people' and their role in changing government took many decades, the problem of how to locate popular sovereignty was solved relatively quickly by the institutional device of the constitutional convention" (Silbey 1994, v. I, p.&nbsp;37).</ref>

<ref name=sovereignty-of-the-people>
* Paul K. Conkin describes "the almost unanimous acceptance of popular sovereignty at the level of abstract principle" (Conkin 1974, p. 52);
* Edmund S. Morgan, concludes that the American Revolution "confirmed and completed the subordination of government to the will of the people" (Morgan 1977, p. 101);
* Willi Paul Adams asserts that statements of the "principle" of the people's sovereignty "expressed the very heart of the consensus among the victors of 1776" (Adams 1980, p. 137).</ref>
}}

{{reflist|30em}}

==References==
* Adams, Willi Paul (1980), ''The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era'', University of North Carolina Press, {{ISBN|978-0-7425-2069-1}}
* Childers, Christopher (March 2011), "", ''Civil War History'' '''57''' (1): 48–70
* Conkin, Paul K. (1974), ''Self-Evident Truths: Being a Discourse on the Origins & Development of the First Principles of American Government—Popular Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and Balance & Separation of Powers'', Indiana University Press, {{ISBN|978-0-253-20198-0}}
* Lutz, Donald S. (1980), ''Popular Consent and Popular Control: Whig Political Theory in the Early State Constitutions'', Louisiana State Univ. Press, {{ISBN|978-0-8071-0596-2}}
* Lutz, Donald S. (1988), ''The Origins of American Constitutionalism'', Louisiana State University Press, {{ISBN|978-0-8071-1506-0}}
* Morgan, Edmund S. (1977), "The Problem of Popular Sovereignty", in ''Aspects of American Liberty: Philosophical, Historical and Political: Addresses Presented at an Observance of the Bicentennial Year of American Independence'' (The American Philosophical Society, 1977) {{ISBN|978-0-8716-9118-7}}
* Morgan, Edmund S. (1988), ''Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America'', W.W. Norton and Company, {{ISBN|0-393-30623-2}}
* Peters, Jr., Ronald M. (1978) ''The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: A Social Compact'', University of Massachusetts Press, {{ISBN|978-0-8071-1506-0}}
* Reid, John Phillip (1986–1993), ''American Revolution'' '''III''' (4 volumes ed.), University of Wisconsin Press, {{ISBN|0-299-13070-3}}
* Silbey, Joel H., ed. (1994), "Constitutional Conventions", ''Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System'' (3 volumes ed.) (Charles Scribner's Sons) '''I''', {{ISBN|978-0-684-19243-7}}
* Tarcov, Nathan (1986), "Popular Sovereignty (in Democratic Political Theory)", in Levy, Leonard, ''Encyclopedia of the American Constitution'' '''3''', {{ISBN|978-0-02-864880-4}}


==Further reading== ==Further reading==
* {{citation |last=Childers |first=Christopher |title=The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics |publisher=University of Kansas Press |year=2012 |pages=334}}
*
* {{citation |last=Etcheson |first=Nicole |title=The Great Principle of Self-Government: Popular Sovereignty and Bleeding Kansas |journal=Kansas History |volume=27 |date=Spring–Summer 2004 |pages=14–29}} links it to ]
* {{citation |last=Johannsen |first=Robert W. |title=Stephen A. Douglas |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1973 |pages=576–613}}.


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Latest revision as of 05:27, 2 January 2025

"Sovereign people" redirects here. For the Curaçaoan political party, see Sovereign People. Idea that the people are the source of all power

Popular sovereignty is the principle that the leaders of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political legitimacy. Popular sovereignty, being a principle, does not imply any particular political implementation. Benjamin Franklin expressed the concept when he wrote that "In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns".

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In Defensor pacis, Marsilius of Padua advocated a form of republicanism that views the people as the only legitimate source of political authority. Sovereignty lies with the people, and the people should elect, correct, and, if necessary, depose its political leaders.

Popular sovereignty in its modern sense is an idea that dates to the social contract school represented by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau authored a book titled The Social Contract, a prominent political work that highlighted the idea of the "general will". The central tenet of popular sovereignty is that the legitimacy of a government's authority and of its laws is based on the consent of the governed. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all held that individuals enter into a social contract, voluntarily giving up some of their natural freedom, so as to secure protection from the dangers inherent in the freedom of others. Whether men are seen as naturally more prone to violence and rapine (Hobbes) or to cooperation and kindness (Rousseau), the idea that a legitimate social order emerges only when liberties and duties are equal among citizens binds the social contract thinkers to the concept of popular sovereignty.

An earlier development of the theory of popular sovereignty is found among the School of Salamanca (see e.g. Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) or Francisco Suarez (1548–1617)). Like the theorists of the divine right of kings and Locke, the Salamancans saw sovereignty as emanating originally from God. However, unlike the divine right theorists and in agreement with Locke, they saw it as passing from God to all people equally, not only to monarchs.

Republics and popular monarchies are theoretically based on popular sovereignty. However, a legalistic notion of popular sovereignty does not necessarily imply an effective, functioning democracy. A party or even an individual dictator may claim to represent the will of the people and rule in its name, which would be congruent with Hobbes's view on the subject. Most modern definitions present democracy as a necessary condition of popular sovereignty.

Judge Ivor Jennings called the notion that governments are the creation of the consent of its people "ridiculous", as "the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people".

United States

Main article: Popular sovereignty in the United States

The application of the doctrine of popular sovereignty receives particular emphasis in American history, notes historian Christian G. Fritz's American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War, a study of the early history of American constitutionalism. In describing how Americans attempted to apply this doctrine prior to the territorial struggle over slavery that led to the Civil War, political scientist Donald S. Lutz noted the variety of American applications:

To speak of popular sovereignty is to place ultimate authority in the people. There are a variety of ways in which sovereignty may be expressed. It may be immediate in the sense that the people make the law themselves, or mediated through representatives who are subject to election and recall; it may be ultimate in the sense that the people have a negative or veto over legislation, or it may be something much less dramatic. In short, popular sovereignty covers a multitude of institutional possibilities. In each case, however, popular sovereignty assumes the existence of some form of popular consent, and it is for this reason that every definition of republican government implies a theory of consent.

— Donald S. Lutz

The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. American revolutionaries aimed to substitute the sovereignty in the person of King George III, with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Thenceforth, American revolutionaries generally agreed with and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people. This was often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed—the idea of the people as a sovereign—and had clear 17th- and 18th-century intellectual roots in English history.

1850s

Main articles: Origins of the American Civil War and Kansas–Nebraska Act

In the 1850s, in the run-up to the Civil War, Northern Democrats led by Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois promoted popular sovereignty as a middle position on the slavery issue. It said that actual residents of territories should be able to decide by voting whether or not slavery would be allowed in the territory. The federal government did not have to make the decision, and by appealing to democracy, Cass and Douglas hoped they could finesse the question of support for or opposition to slavery. Douglas applied popular sovereignty to Kansas in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed Congress in 1854.

The Act had two unexpected results. By dropping the Missouri Compromise of 1820 under which said slavery would never be allowed in Kansas, it was a major boost for the expansion of slavery. Overnight, outrage united anti-slavery forces across the North into an "anti-Nebraska" movement that soon was institutionalized as the Republican Party, with its firm commitment to stop the expansion of slavery.

Also, pro- and anti-slavery elements moved into Kansas with the intention of allowing or banning slavery, which led to a raging state-level civil war, known as "Bleeding Kansas". Abraham Lincoln targeted popular sovereignty in the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858, which left Douglas in a position that alienated Southern pro-slavery Democrats, who considered him weak in his support of slavery. The Southern Democrats broke with the party and ran their own candidate against Lincoln and Douglas in 1860.

See also

Notes

  1. Leonard Levy notes of the "doctrine" of popular sovereignty that it "relates primarily not to the Constitution's operation but to its source of authority and supremacy, ratification, amendment, and possible abolition" (Tarcov 1986, v. 3, p. 1426).
  2. Additional support for the centrality of popular sovereignty include:
    • Ronald M. Peters, Jr., suggests the following as embodying the meaning of popular sovereignty for Americans – "The concept of popular sovereignty holds simply that in a society organized for political action, the will of the people as a whole is the only right standard of political action" (Peters, Jr. 1978, p. 1);
    • Donald S. Lutz suggests that popular sovereignty came to have meaning in "the way Americans viewed themselves as a people. They firmly believed that on their own authority they could form themselves into a community, create or replace a government to order their community, select and replace those who hold government office, determine which values bind them as a community and thus which values should guide them those in government when making decisions for the community, and replace political institutions at variance with these values" (Lutz 1980, p. 10);
    • Joel H. Silbey, states "The justification of the American Revolution and republican government—-as opposed to the monarchical forms of government in Europe—rested on the theory of popular sovereignty. In essence, that theory established the basic premise of American political life: the ultimate and sole legitimacy of government rests on the consent of 'the people.' Defining 'the people' became one of the central issues in the development of the American experience, but soon after declaring independence, American revolutionaries came to agree that popular sovereignty underlay America's republican governments. If identifying 'the people' and their role in changing government took many decades, the problem of how to locate popular sovereignty was solved relatively quickly by the institutional device of the constitutional convention" (Silbey 1994, v. I, p. 37).
    • Paul K. Conkin describes "the almost unanimous acceptance of popular sovereignty at the level of abstract principle" (Conkin 1974, p. 52);
    • Edmund S. Morgan, concludes that the American Revolution "confirmed and completed the subordination of government to the will of the people" (Morgan 1977, p. 101);
    • Willi Paul Adams asserts that statements of the "principle" of the people's sovereignty "expressed the very heart of the consensus among the victors of 1776" (Adams 1980, p. 137).
  1. Benjamin Franklin (2003). The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin. Edited by Ralph Ketchum; Hackett Publishing. p. 398. ISBN 0872206831.
  2. Alan Gewirth, "Marsilius of Padua", in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5. New York: Macmillan, 1967, p. 167.
  3. Mayall, James (2013). "International Society, State Sovereignty, and National Self-Determination". In Breuilly, John (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 542. ISBN 978-0-19-876820-3.
  4. Christian G. Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2008) at p. 290, 400. ISBN 978-0-521-88188-3
  5. Lutz 1980, p. 38
  6. On the English origins of the sovereignty of the people and consent as the basis of government, see: Reid 1986–1993, v. III, pp. 97–101, 107–110; Morgan 1988, passim
  7. Childers 2011, pp. 48–70

References

  • Adams, Willi Paul (1980), The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era, University of North Carolina Press, ISBN 978-0-7425-2069-1
  • Childers, Christopher (March 2011), "Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay", Civil War History 57 (1): 48–70
  • Conkin, Paul K. (1974), Self-Evident Truths: Being a Discourse on the Origins & Development of the First Principles of American Government—Popular Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and Balance & Separation of Powers, Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0-253-20198-0
  • Lutz, Donald S. (1980), Popular Consent and Popular Control: Whig Political Theory in the Early State Constitutions, Louisiana State Univ. Press, ISBN 978-0-8071-0596-2
  • Lutz, Donald S. (1988), The Origins of American Constitutionalism, Louisiana State University Press, ISBN 978-0-8071-1506-0
  • Morgan, Edmund S. (1977), "The Problem of Popular Sovereignty", in Aspects of American Liberty: Philosophical, Historical and Political: Addresses Presented at an Observance of the Bicentennial Year of American Independence (The American Philosophical Society, 1977) ISBN 978-0-8716-9118-7
  • Morgan, Edmund S. (1988), Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, W.W. Norton and Company, ISBN 0-393-30623-2
  • Peters, Jr., Ronald M. (1978) The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: A Social Compact, University of Massachusetts Press, ISBN 978-0-8071-1506-0
  • Reid, John Phillip (1986–1993), American Revolution III (4 volumes ed.), University of Wisconsin Press, ISBN 0-299-13070-3
  • Silbey, Joel H., ed. (1994), "Constitutional Conventions", Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System (3 volumes ed.) (Charles Scribner's Sons) I, ISBN 978-0-684-19243-7
  • Tarcov, Nathan (1986), "Popular Sovereignty (in Democratic Political Theory)", in Levy, Leonard, Encyclopedia of the American Constitution 3, ISBN 978-0-02-864880-4

Further reading

  • Childers, Christopher (2012), The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics, University of Kansas Press, p. 334
  • Etcheson, Nicole (Spring–Summer 2004), "The Great Principle of Self-Government: Popular Sovereignty and Bleeding Kansas", Kansas History, 27: 14–29 links it to Jacksonian Democracy
  • Johannsen, Robert W. (1973), Stephen A. Douglas, Oxford University Press, pp. 576–613.
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