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It has been suggested that Consent of the governed be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since February 2008.

Popular sovereignty or the sovereignty of the people is the belief that the legitimacy of the state is created by the will or consent of its people, who are the source of all political power. It is closely associated to the social contract philosophers, among whom are Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is often contrasted with the concept of parliamentary sovereignty.

Benjamin Franklin expressed the concept when he wrote, "In free governments the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns."

American Historical Context

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

References

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1. Jefferson on Politics & Government: The Sovereignty of the People
2. 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.")
3. 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”).
4. 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
5. 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”).
6. 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.”) Prologue,.American Sovereigns, p.l
7. 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

See also

• Consent of the governed
• Declaration of Arbroath
• Claim of Right 1989
• Scottish Constitutional Commission

Further reading

• Future of Democracy

• Articles to be merged from February 2008
• Political theories
• Political science terms
• Politics of Scotland
• United Kingdom constitution