Popular sovereignty is the principle that the authority of a state and its government
are created and sustained by the consent of its people, through their
elected representatives (Rule by the People), who are the source of all
political power. It is closely associated with social contract philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Popular sovereignty expresses a concept and does not necessarily reflect or describe a political reality. Benjamin Franklin
expressed the concept when he wrote, "In free governments, the rulers
are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns".
Earlier development of popular sovereignty arose from philosopher Francisco Suárez and became the basis for Latin American independence.
Earlier development of popular sovereignty arose from philosopher Francisco Suárez and became the basis for Latin American independence.
Origins
Popular sovereignty in its modern sense, is an idea that dates to the social contracts school (mid-17th to mid-18th centuries), represented by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), author of The Social Contract, a prominent political work that clearly highlighted the ideals of "general will" and further matured the idea of popular sovereignty. The central tenet is that the legitimacy of rule or of law is based on the consent of the governed. Popular sovereignty is thus a basic tenet of most Republics,
and in some monarchies. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were the most
influential thinkers of this school, all postulating that individuals
choose to enter into a social contract with one another, thus
voluntarily giving up some of their natural freedom in return for
protection from dangers derived from the freedom of others. Whether men
were seen as naturally more prone to violence and rapine (Hobbes) or
cooperation and kindness (Rousseau), the idea that a legitimate social
order emerges only when the liberties and duties are equal among
citizens binds the social contract thinkers to the concept of popular
sovereignty.
A parallel development of a theory of popular sovereignty can be found among the School of Salamanca (see e.g. Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) or Francisco Suarez (1548–1617)), who (like the theorists of the divine right of kings and Locke) saw sovereignty as emanating originally from God, but (unlike divine right theorists and in agreement with Locke) passing from God to all people equally, not only to monarchs.
Republics and popular monarchies
is 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, pretending to detain auctoritas.
That would be congruent with Hobbes's view on the subject, but not with
most modern definitions that see democracy as a necessary condition of
popular sovereignty.
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. With their Revolution, Americans substituted the
sovereignty in the person of King George III,
with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Thenceforth,
American revolutionaries generally 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 had
clear 17th and 18th-century intellectual roots in English history.
1850s
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 (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. Second, pro-
and anti-slavery elements moved into Kansas with the intention of
voting slavery up or down, leading to a raging civil war, known as "Bleeding Kansas".
Abraham Lincoln targeted popular sovereignty in the Lincoln-Douglas
Debates of 1858, leaving Douglas in a position that alienated Southern
pro-slavery Democrats who thought he was too weak in his support of
slavery. The Southern Democrats broke off and ran their own candidate
against Lincoln and Douglas in 1860.
