Popular Sovereignty

Disruption ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 140-200
Author(s):  
David Potter
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Constitutional Thought ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter 4 explores how the same set of ideas about ideal constitutions resulted in two radically different outcomes: the American Constitution, and the French Revolution and its numerous, failed constitutions. The chapter traces the development of constitutional thought from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, focusing on the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Again we explore the importance of media for the spread of ideas and then the adaptation of those ideas by practical politicians to very different ends.

The Literature on War: Part II

1942 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
William O. Shanahan
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Present Survey ◽  
Military Literature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The French Revolution

“It is a great advantage to princes to have perused (military) histories in their youth, for in them they read at length of such assemblies and of the great frauds and deceptions and perjuries which some of the ancients have, practised on one another, and how they have taken and killed those who put their trust in such security. It is not to be said that all have used them, but the example of one is sufficient to make several wise and to cause them to wish to protect themselves.” For present-day democracies this advice of Philippe de Commynes, the fifteenth century French historian, has a pointed meaning. Only when the liberties of free peoples are threatened can their interest in war and armies be aroused. Tyrants and autocrats, on the other hand, never neglect the study of the role of war in statecraft. If we are to remain free the lessons of war must be studied continually. With this principle in mind the present survey of military literature is intended to suggest some of the important books that have been written since the French Revolution.

The aesthetics of Burke’s constitutionalism: A dialectical reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372091314
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Rustighi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Partial Representation ◽  
Constitutional Thought ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

I propose taking the beautiful and the sublime in Edmund Burke not just as aesthetic but also as theoretical categories which can help us read his constitutional thought in dialectical terms. I suggest indeed that his usage of these categories in the Reflections on the Revolution in France points to a consistently held argument concerning the aporias of early-modern contractarian theories and their influence on the French Revolution. My hypothesis is that for Burke the Revolution is unable to think of any concrete relation between beauty and sublimity, insofar as they can be associated, respectively, with particularity and universality. Furthermore, I underscore how Burke’s defence of partial representation against contractarian representation aims to overcome this impasse. My goal is to demonstrate that Burke raises decisive questions as to the intrinsically anti-democratic effects of the contractarian concept of democracy and is still useful to confront the contemporary crisis of democratic participation.

Perpetual Peace and Fichte’s Theory of the State

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Nakhimovsky
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Constitutional Theory ◽  
The Real ◽  
European State ◽  
Constitutional Government ◽  
Perpetual Peace ◽  
Definitive Statement ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter recounts how Fichte's theory of the state was profoundly shaped by his encounter with Rousseau, Sieyès, and Kant. Fichte developed a more radical version of the constitutional theory that had been advanced by Sieyès and Kant during the French Revolution, one that sought to improve upon Rousseau's description of constitutional government and to institutionalize his account of popular sovereignty. According to his many German admirers, it was Sieyès, and not his Jacobin opponents, who was the real inheritor of Rousseau, because the kind of egalitarian democracy demanded by Robespierre and others was unable to function as a government of laws in a modern European state. Fichte declared that he had produced the definitive statement of this Sieyèsian constitutionalism and claimed he had captured its true spirit by showing how it did not permanently exclude the possibility of far more egalitarian systems than those proposed by either Sieyès or Kant.

Varieties of Democracy in the French Revolution

2013 ◽  
pp. 57-68
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Important Concept ◽  
The People ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Though the French Revolution had a major impact on how people have talked about democracy ever since, the word was not initially central to revolutionary discourse, though it became more central when interest shifted from making government legitimate towards making it effective. When legitimacy was the key concern, popular sovereignty was a more important concept (though not one favoured by all revolutionary thinkers). Emphasis on will as the basis of legitimacy encouraged the view that the legislature was the most legitimate organ. ‘Democracy’ gained importance during the Terror, as discussion focussed on the challenge of making any form of authority in practice prevail over the people. Representation of the people and surveillance of government by the people were both mooted as solutions. In France (as elsewhere) democracy gained new negative associations in the course of the revolution, because democracy was experienced more as a problem than as a solution.

Mediating Print Culture: Censorship, Revolutionary Journalism and the Manifesto of Equals

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanja Perovic
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
First Time ◽  
The French Revolution

Freedom of expression and censorship are frequently cast in opposing but symmetrical terms. According to the conventional narrative, the right to free speech was acquired when first the American and then the French Revolution overthrew the repressive censorship apparatus of the ancien régime. However this account of increasing emancipation overlooks the important role played by the French Revolution in establishing a new definition of censorship that was both tolerant of free speech and repressive of political difference. This paper contends that precisely when political representation in the widest possible sense is at stake, freedom of speech cannot be reduced solely to a question of rights. It begins by revisiting the Directory period when the enlightened ideal of an unmediated public sphere openly clashed for the first time with the opposing ideal of an ‘unmediated’ or ‘popular’ sovereignty promoted by the radical press. It then focuses on the Conspiracy of Equals to show how the presumed neutrality of the liberal press was forged by repressing competing understandings of the right to free speech. Rather than assume that revolutionary propaganda is the ‘other’ of liberalism, this paper demonstrates the joint origins of both liberal and revolutionary understandings of free speech in the new censorship laws that attempted to separate the message from the medium of revolution.

The Transformation of Alliance Systems

1965 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 589-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Dinerstein
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Nation State ◽  
High Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
The French Revolution

The pattern of international relations has always been in flux. The further we are removed from a period, the easier it is to discern its most salient features. So the fifteenth century now emerges as the time of the birth of the nation-state which was to become the key factor in international relations. Yet the supra-national church was not successfully challenged until the next century. Today it is clear that the French revolution completed the conversion of dynastic states into national states. In retrospect the 18th and particularly the 19th centuries are seen as the high point of the world expansion of Europe and the extension of its system of international relations. Now we realize that the Japanese victory over Russia in 1904–1905 marked the beginning of the counter-offensive against Europe. But what emerges sharply now was obscured then by a welter of incident.

Hegel's Politics: Liberal or Democratic?

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Drydyk
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Press Freedom ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
The French Revolution

It probably comes as a surprise to no one that Hegel's political philosophy is difficult to interpret. But his political thought clearly poses problems which the rest of his work does not (especially), and these problems arise from apparent political ambivalence on his part towards the French Revolution, towards monarchy, towards the doctrine of popular sovereignty, towards public opinion and press freedom - well, there is scarcely a reader of Hegel who could not add some additional topic to this already lengthy list. For instance, Hegel sometimes noted how crucial it is for a state to be decisive; every state needs a reservoir of decisiveness, supplied preferably by a monarch, who ‘has become the personality of the state,’ who ‘cuts short the weighing of the pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying “I will” make its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality.’

Metternich’s Europe

1998 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter explores the childhood of Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900) and the political climate in which he had grown up. He was born in Steingrub, Bohemia in 1890. Of the first twenty-seven years of the man who said that he became a naturalized American amid these surroundings, very little is known, save that he was born into a fettered society; and its chains were heavier because they had been reimposed after a period of near freedom. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had spread throughout Europe the aspiration for popular sovereignty and the rights of nationalities: the Congress of Vienna gave scant recognition to the new forces and set about restoring the ancien régime. The genius of those who set themselves to thwart the allied forces of liberalism and nationalism was Clemens von Metternich, Austrian Foreign Minister from 1809 till 1848. It was in the Austrian Empire where Wise lived that, despite Metternich’s awareness of the need for reform, his system operated to the worst effect.

scholarly journals How to think beyond sovereignty: On Sieyes and constituent power

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Rubinelli
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Theories Of Sovereignty ◽  
The French Revolution

Historians and political theorists have long been interested in how the principle of people’s power was conceptualised during the French Revolution. Traditionally, two diverging accounts emerge, one of national and the other of popular sovereignty, the former associated with moderate monarchist deputies, including the Abbé Sieyes, and the latter with the Jacobins. This paper argues against this binary interpretation of the political thought of the French Revolution, in favour of a third account of people’s power, Sieyes’ idea of pouvoir constituant. Traditionally, constituent power has been viewed as a variation of sovereignty, but I show it to be an independent conceptualisation of people’s power. Sieyes’ political theory led him to criticise and refuse contemporary theories of sovereignty in favour of what he understood as a fully modern account of people’s power. Based on extensive research in the archives, I show how Sieyes opposed the deployment of sovereignty by the revolutionary Assemblies and recommended replacing it with the idea of constituent power.

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