Popular Sovereignty in Democracy and Republic
Graham Maddox
The University of New England, Australia
Res publica res populi.1 The republic is the people’s business! Scarcely could there be a more
succinct and compelling statement of popular sovereignty than this, written some seventeen
hundred years before Hobbes and Bodin. That the anachronistic ‘sovereignty’ is nevertheless
appropriate is made clear by Cicero’s amplification of the subject. It cannot apply to any old
mob, but refers to a congregation of people ‘associated by a common consent to the law and
by a common interest’.2 The words are placed in the mouth of the revered late general,
Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, whom Cicero admired as a model for a ‘rector’ of the
republic — an honest leader devoted to Stoic ideals — one who might rescue the republic
from the chaos of its dying years. Cicero himself was to pay with his life for his ideals, as
competing gang leaders vied to annihilate traditional virtues in their cupiditas dominandi,
their thirst for oppressing others.
The last man standing in these internecine struggles, Caesar Octavian, was to grace
himself with the title ‘Augustus’ while yet modestly insisting that he was merely princeps, the
first man in Rome in a repaired constitution. It is a ‘modern illusion’ that Augustus set out to
restore the republic, but it seems evident that he intended to cast his form of government in
ironclad institutions admitting of no challenge.3 If we are to source the implicit origins of
sovereignty in the Roman principate, it would be as well to acknowledge its republican
predecessor. The Augustan settlement was a subversion of republican ideals about where the
centre of power lay.
Republic and democracy
Appealing though Cicero’s insight is, the structure of the republic compromised the Roman
version of sovereignty. The problem lies in how the authority of the people was organized in
practical application, and implicitly foreshadows a challenge to Bodin’s designation of the
sovereign. The populace was at first strictly divided by caste, the patricians and plebeians
being separated by an impenetrable social and legal divide. The lex Hortensia of 287 BC to a
certain extent removed political disabilities from the plebs since the plebeian assembly
attained the right to legislate on behalf of the entire republic. The leaders of the plebeian
assembly, the tribunes, were now in a position to enact safeguards against discrimination by
the official magistrates, and to enact much of the business of the entire state. This in event
meant cooperating with the traditional rulers, whose power was concentrated in the legally
informal, but immensely influential Senate. Wealthy plebeians rose to positions of power in
the commonwealth, which did little to alleviate the ills of the more numerous poor; they were
still entitled to feel an effectual discrimination as mere plebeians.
Apart from the plebeian assembly, which came to be dominated by the aristocratic
Senate through the arcana imperii, the hidden means of exercising power, the formal
assemblies which conducted the elections of officers of state were structured into layers of
influence categorized by wealth. At every turn, the poor were thwarted. In this regard
Cicero’s dictum needs to be viewed with caution. It was all very well for Rome, having
sloughed off the rule of foreign kings and established republicanism as rule without kings, to
claim that alternatively they had vested authority in the ‘name’ of the people: Senatus
populusque Romanus. In reality the emphasis was squarely on the Senate; the formulation
populusque seemed to be a casting around for an appealing new name. Before the time of the
lex Hortensia the plebs had no part in popular rule, and even after that legislation the many
poor were structured out of the system.
Cicero himself was suspicious of popular rule. The very law, the lex Hortensia, that
eliminated political discrimination from the plebs, was said to have originated in a ‘secession’
of the plebs from the city at the time all hands were required to defend the state from enemies.
2
We would call the action a rebellion, and Cicero ‘sedition’. The plebeian office of tribune
was informal, itself resulting from plebeian strike action. It was, in Cicero’s view, an office
conceived in, and for the purposes of, sedition.4 The maxim res populi, the people’s affair, is
a fine proposition for popular sovereignty, but it needs to be unpacked before it can serve as
any kind of description of the exercise of popular authority. At the least it offers as the
abiding critique of the central fact of the empire, imperium, which it would not be amiss to
call naked power.
By contrast to res populi consider the Greek demokratia. In much modern republican
literature the terms seem to be almost interchangeable. Yet the unpacking suggested here
reveals a great difference. Demokratia was used by Herodotus to denote the form of
government in which the people ruled themselves. If we take the familiar model of Athens,
we must concede that democracy did not include all the people resident in the city-state. As
with the Romans, women played no formal part in governing, and neither were foreign
residents and slaves part of the citizen body. The effective populace competent to govern
consisted of all adult males eligible to take part in military service. The assembly in which
they met was omnicompetent — to all intents ‘sovereign’. Although there was an advisory
council charged with conducting business in the assembly’s name between meetings of the
assembly, and preparing agenda for assembly business, the assembly itself was the final
authority of all matters of state, including defence, public finance, religion, public works,
trade, war, foreign relations and the distribution of wealth.
The radicalism of the demokratia lay in its indifference to wealth, education or class.
The community knew social distinctions well enough, but these cut no ice in terms of political
exclusion. No doubt notables were equipped to play a leading role in the assembly, but noone was excluded on the basis of low standing in the community.
The ancient prefigurings of ‘sovereignty’ are superior to the modern; in either case
they embrace a measure of public control over public affairs. They establish a legitimacy in
which ‘the people’ may own their constitution while acknowledging the need to surrender
certain ‘natural’ liberties for the sake of a common good.5 And between them, demokratia is
superior for its indifference to class or caste discrimination, and for its more direct
involvement of the people in the exercise of power. As ‘direct democracy’ it establishes an
ideal type that renders sovereignty a benign concept. At Athens the assembly took into
account the redistribution of wealth to enable the poor to survive in reasonable security.
Though himself hostile to the constitutional arrangement, in his most austere empirical mood
Aristotle characterized democracy as ‘rule by the poor’. Paradoxically, this was equivalent to
‘rule by the people’, and only intimated that among the people — the many — the poor are
most numerous. After distinguishing rule by the many (poor) from the rule of the one and the
rule of the few, he then went on to delineate political programs whereby democracy could be
maintained as such without degeneration into some other form of government. Rule by the
poor also meant rule for the poor, without destroying the claims of the not-poor: ‘…one who
is genuinely of the popular sort should see to it that the multitude is not overly poor…
Measures must therefore be devised so that there will be abundance over time. Since this is
advantageous also to the well off, what ought to be done is to accumulate what is left over of
the revenues and distribute accumulated [sums] to the poor.’6
It is significant that this program of income redistribution carefully avoids
dispossession of the rich, who are honoured for the substantial contributions they might
voluntarily make to the community.7 The first century of the democracy repeatedly awarded
the highest civic honours to men of the aristocracy. The most notable statesmen were
aristocrats: Cleisthenes, Themistocles, Cimon, Ephialtes and Pericles.8 The democracy was
run by the votes of the ordinary men, and it was conducted in their interests. Yet, in addition
to the continued prominence of aristocrats in the fifth century, the constitution itself took the
interests of the rich into account. The constitutional oaths sworn by citizens newly come of
age and by prospective jurors ensured that debts would not be cancelled nor property
3
confiscated from honest landholders. As Finley reports, ‘…the oath taken by Athenian jurors
included “I will not allow the cancellation of debts or the redistribution of land or houses
belonging to Athenian citizens”’.9 There was a sense, therefore, that the Athenian democracy
maintained a conception of the common good while yet accommodating a bias to the poor. As
Aristotle says, in a democracy based on equality, the law ‘asserts that there is equality when
the poor are no more prominent than the well off, and neither have authority, but they are both
[treated as] similar’.10 The heritage of the rich was thus maintained while the poor benefited.
At the same time, the rich were expected to contribute to the common stock proportionally
through public ‘liturgies’, providing funds for naval vessels or for religious festivals. For the
most part they did so willingly, accepting in return honours and privileges from a community
which they felt belonged to them as much as to the poor in whose interests it was governed. In
this sense, democracy is legitimately called government for the poor while not being against
the rich. In his many studies on the Athenian democracy, Gregory Vlastos emphasized again
and again the radical nature of the Athenian democracy. Despite all the acknowledged
corruption and actual material inequality, no other polity had ever accorded such dignity to
the common person. That the banausoi, the people who had to work with their hands, were
citizens was the hallmark of democracy.11 After all, as Aristotle noted, the rich had ample
means of looking after themselves.12 While the community prospered, everybody was better
off. Nowadays we might call this the trickle up effect. A marked difference between the
democracy of Athens and the republic of Rome was that there were no patron-client
relationships in the democracy, whereby, as in Rome, rich aristocrats would control the votes,
and display the public support, of clients who depended on them for economic subsistence or
who were beholden to them for particular favours.13
The assembly of the Athenians was a broad-based representative body, acting at most
times in the interests of the whole community. That is why Thucydides could have Pericles
of Athens announcing that Athens was the envy of the world, especially in the way it
accorded dignity and liberty to its people, and fostered a general civility throughout: ‘There
is no exclusiveness in our public life.’14 Warlike and aggressive to its enemies, and, it must
be said, its subject peoples, as far as internal structure was concerned, the sovereignty of
Athens represented an aspirational ideal.
It is the purpose of this paper to recommend the Athenian notion of sovereignty, that
supreme power rests with ‘the people’, as a universal ideal. Of course the Athenian version of
‘the people’ must be qualified. The citizenry was confined to adult males eligible for military
service. Much more numerous were those who, strictly speaking, were not citizens: the
foreign residents, the slaves, the children and the women, who figure repeatedly as important
agents in Greek literature, especially drama, and who were carriers of Athenian citizenship
even though they were not members of the assembly.15 Yet there was a social sense in which
the non-citizens were integral to the city as a whole; at times foreigners, and even slaves, were
called to witness in law cases. The metics (foreigners) were essential to the economy of the
community, creating commodities and supplies, and engaging in foreign trade, while much of
the citizens’ time and energies were occupied in civic and military duties. Slaves could be
integral members of households and the ‘public service’, including what we would now call
police, and were sometimes called ‘fellow workers’.16 Surprisingly, Vlastos attributes the
most radical conception of democracy (an idea that surely influenced later Christianity), to the
aristocratic circle in Athens: Socrates’s statecraft was democratic in the literal sense, and to
locate it only in the demos would be to understate its scope. ‘The criterion of his
statesmanship is whether or not it improves the souls of the people of Athens — even the
souls of slaves.’ To Socrates as in Vlastos: ‘…everyone is called upon to make the
improvement of soul the supreme concern of his or her personal existence — everyone, alien
and citizen, slave and freeman, female and male.’17 In a brilliant article, Josiah Ober explains
how the relationship between the polity and the whole population could be construed as an
example of the social contract, with the citizens entrusted to look out for the whole. The
4
slaves, it is true, lacked freedom, and had no choice as of right, but they were regarded by
Aristotle as brought to their position by nature, and therefore rationally. Their presence
participated in the ‘advantage of the entire polis.’18 Unfortunately, according dignity to slaves
may serve as an excuse for the toleration of slavery as an institution. To designate a person a
slave is to declare him or her incapable of self-determination and therefore ultimately to strip
them of the dignity required for genuine democratic participation.19 At least Aristotle says
that when citizens enact correct laws, their ‘correctness must be taken to mean “in an equal
spirit”: what is [enacted] in an equal spirit is correct with a view to the advantage of the city
as a whole…’20 In Ober’s sense the politai (citizens) were under a political contract to
provide justice for all.
What makes democratic Athens a worthy model for sovereignty is the intimate
connection between the community as a whole and the politeuma, the ruling institution —
that is, the citizen body construed as legislators. The form of government is rooted in the
dianoia (‘ideological predisposition’) of the people, while the structures of government are
arranged according to preexisting relations of power. Ober demonstrates that the democracy
could not exist without its being founded on a community devoted to ideals of justice,
equality before the law, and, perhaps most important, the dignity of all citizens.21 In his
classic study, F. H. Hinsley likewise notes the close connection between polity and tribal
society in Athens, but his conclusion that sovereignty is a term difficult to apply because of its
‘lacking separate state forms’ is insupportable, because the Athenian assembly was the
quintessential political organ of the exemplary democracy.22
Undoubtedly the style of politics at Athens was not suited to all tastes. It had its
internal critics, since most of the renowned philosophy of the Greek elites was against the
‘rule by the poor’.23 There were some who were outraged at the favour accorded to common
and uncouth fellows.24 Others were more philosophical in their distaste. For those given to
arranging affairs in neat taxonomies, democracy seemed disorderly and random. For
example, the assembly space could only hold at most six thousand members, out of a total
citizen population of, say, forty-thousand men.25 From one assembly to another there may be
a quite different composition among the attendees. Sometimes it was difficult to rouse
citizens to attend the assembly. Occasionally their decisions were rash, and on one occasion,
while most of the thetes (the poorest servicemen) were absent on campaign, the assembly was
terrorized into voting the democracy itself out of existence in favour of an oligarchy. There
can be no doubting the seriousness of its deliberations when high matters were at stake. Or
their courage: in many Greek states (including Athens and Sparta) and in early Rome, the men
who made the decisions to fight were largely those who went straight into battle themselves,
from the commanders down the social and economic scale to the men of modest property who
constituted the heavy infantry, and to the poor who manned the warships.26 Scarcely a year
went by without the demos in assembly having to make military decisions that put their own
lives at stake. For example, the assembly met in 339 B.C. to consider the problem of Philip of
Macedon's expansion into Greece ‘and they knew that for many of them the day's decision
would mean immediate army service and probably combat. That knowledge would have
focused the mind sharply; it would have given the debate a reality and spontaneity that
modern parliaments may once have had but now notoriously lack.’27
The nature of sovereignty
Whether res publica and demokratia are terms suitable for denoting sovereignty depends on
what sovereignty is ultimately construed to mean. For all that the critics reject the term
‘sovereignty’ on account of its protean imprecision, one variety, ‘popular sovereignty’
deserves precedence in that all sovereignty requires willing compliance on the part of the
people. The modern term was born of religious conflict of a type unknown in pre-Christian
5
antiquity. The ancients pose some challenge to the modern definers of ‘sovereignty’, among
the most prominent of whom are Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. Both lived through the
chaos of religious wars, and both sought stability in an era of uncertainty.
Popular sovereignty in the sense adumbrated by Aristotle could have no place in the
modern sovereignty of Jean Bodin, whose sovereign was unconnected to the ethos of a
community. Yet, as J. W. Allen insisted, Bodin could be interpreted in different ways by
different followers.28 Bodin lived through virulent religious conflict in a France that knew
persecutions and a notorious sectarian massacre. Indeed, he was attempting to stem the tide
of popular uprising. His political theory had some affinity with Machiavelli, who himself had
addressed the causes of radical instability in human organization. The greatest threat to
political stability in his own age came from the prolific ‘monarchomach’ literature and the
activities of the Huguenot party,29 which justified resistance to tyrants by reference to
scripture and to Roman laws influenced by Stoicism. The notion of a ‘mixed constitution’,
under which the monarch shared authority with the estates and also the Church, had
contributed to instability. Authority had to be focused in a single, undivided and unassailable
source, where its location was unmistakable. Bodin argued that sovereignty derives from
human nature and that stability is a basic human need (along with family and the ownership
of property). The power of the monarch was theoretically unanswerable, and it could never be
right to oppose a properly constituted king. His sovereignty was perpetual, and should last
the whole life of the king.30 Resistance against a usurper tyrant was supportable, but tyranny
was not attributable to a powerful monarch in the way that the Huguenots claimed. Bodin’s
monarch was never answerable to the people, but was accountable only to God and the laws
of nature. The possibility of a ‘mixed constitution’ he regarded as ‘absurd’.31 He therefore
endowed his concept with a force many have taken to be authoritarian. Whatever influence
Bodin may have had on an absolutist French monarchy,32 J. W. Allen insists that his
sovereignty was theoretical, unified and supreme, but since absolute stability in human affairs
was an impossible dream, his construct would not really exist in material fact.33
In an important article, C. H. McIlwain took the second, Latin, edition of Bodin’s Six
Books of the Republic to be his considered work on the subject of sovereignty. Therein
majesty (maiestas) is held to be the supreme power over citizens and subjects that is not
bound by the laws (Maiestas est summa in cives ac subditos legibusque soluta potestas).34
McIlwain invests a great deal in Bodin’s choice of ‘potestas’ for power. It derives from
ancient Roman law, specifically the Lex De Imperio, the act that confers power upon the
emperor. The lex confers both imperium and potestas on the emperor, thus distinguishing
between them: imperium is the supreme military power, the monopoly of force, while
potestas is, in McIlwain’s terms, supreme legal authority. He quotes T. H. Green to the effect
that ‘The ultimate imponent of law cannot be derived or limited by law’.35 Naked power can
persist as long as the gun is pointed at the head of the subject, but potestas implies willing
obedience, including a recognition on the part of subjects that it is in their own best interests
to live in a society regulated by law, and that the centre of legal authority, the sovereign, is
readily identified, is one, and is supreme. Unlike Bodin, Green himself follows Aristotle and
connects sovereignty firmly to the ethos of the people; the sovereign power must exist for the
common good. Bodin’s conception is somewhat like Machiavelli’s: there can be no common
good without a settled state, and sovereignty above all defines the limits of the state as the
limits of the sovereign’s province of power. The correlative of potestas, obedience,
ultimately rests the final authority in the people. The formal organ of power, as long as it is
the instrument of the common good, is suffered to be uncontrolled by law, and is therefore
legally sovereign, but by no means practically or politically irresponsible.
“Sovereignty” properly applies only … to legal supremacy, not to practical
irresponsibility. The organ is in law sovereign, the people is in fact irresponsible.
No one will question the legal authority of such a supreme legislative assembly.
6
Its word is law. So long as it remains the sovereign organ all must obey it. But if
its acts should permanently cease to be for the public good as the people see it,
nothing could prevent their abolishing an organ they have ceased to trust.36
This classical view of the sovereign as the ‘imponent’ of law is quite misconstrued by those
who see sovereignty as the absolute physical protection of a community. As Benjamin R.
Barber sees it, ‘…terrorism has already made a mockery of sovereignty. What were the
hijacking of airliners, the calamitous attack on the World Trade Center, and the brash attack
on the Pentagon if not a profound obliteration of American sovereignty?’37 Well, no. The
laws of the United States were broken, but not removed. Barber may have it in mind that for
the instant the United States government was unable to control the monopoly of force, but this
is only, on a massively different scale, an example of the everyday illegal use of firearms
throughout the country; it challenges the laws, but they are still available to authorize the
pursuit of the miscreants.
It is doubtful whether Bodin would have agreed with McIlwain’s version of his
sovereignty, since the latter makes it ultimately lead to the possibility of resistance, the very
problem Bodin was seeking to address. At the time of writing McIlwain was yet to witness
the full coercive might of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, but he had observed their
foreshadowing in Mussolini’s fascism. Nevertheless the logic of the unpacked potential of
potestas was a strong antidote to the authoritarianism rising in Europe in his day. The variety
of interpretations about Bodin needs to be acknowledged. At the least he consolidated an old
idea about political authority into a useful modern concept, and focused necessary attention
on the emerging modern state.38
Bodin’s near contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, is usually credited with the first full
theory of the modern state. In Hobbes’s case sovereignty was born of fear; the fear of
catastrophe such as he had lived through in the English Civil War. He was exercised by the
variety of personal interpretations of scripture, with each person’s version, sanctioned by the
voice of God, deemed absolute and unanswerable. Words had lost their meaning, and no-one
could meet another on agreed or settled terms. It amounted to a war of all against all,
resulting in a reversion to a state of nature in which life would be hazardous indeed. His
solution was to delegate all political authority to an overriding authority to establish meaning,
to delineate the bounds of appropriate behaviour. This authority, the Leviathan of terrifying
aspect, was to be constituted by the conferring of individual liberties upon the ruler, or ruling
body. Some modern liberals tend to be accommodating of Hobbes’s authoritarianism in that
it confined the delegation of personal powers to matters of coercion, the monopoly of
legitimate force coming to be a defining characteristic of sovereignty. Private lives, not
impinging on the political or infringing the rights of others, were to be left in the private
realm. On this account Hobbes could be seen as making a ‘contribution to the tradition of
enlightened despotism’.39 There is a remote sense in which this form of sovereignty may be
called ‘popular’, at least in that each person is held willingly to hand over a portion of liberty
to the central authority. Once this notional constituting act has taken place, however, all
public decision-making is left in the hands of the sovereign, the people having no avenue now
for self-expression in political affairs. The sovereign would be a guarantee of established
meanings.40 What is ultimately at issue, however, is the clash of unrestrained passions.41 As
Ian Shapiro replies to Philip Pettit, ‘To escape the war of all against all, we need a science of
the human will, not a theory of language.’42 To rescue humankind from a brutish and
dangerous condition, Hobbes proposes to construct from first principles the instrument of
salvation. Believing Aristotle to be the worst of all teachers, in sharp contrast to him he
argues that the state is not a natural outcome of the human growth process, but a necessary
construct, through the artificial bond of a covenant to establish law and legal power on a
stable basis.43
7
For a Law…is the Commandment of that Man, or Assembly, to whom we have given
sovereign Authority, to make such Rules for the direction of our actions, as hee shall
think fit; and to punish us, when we doe any thing contrary to the same. When
therefore any other man shall offer unto us any other Rules, which the Sovereign Ruler
hath not prescribed, they are but Counsell, and Advice; which, whether good, or bad,
hee that is counselled, may without injustice refuse to observe.44
The sovereign is supreme and brooks no rival. Hobbes was scathing about the idea that the
state should be ruled jointly by ecclesiastical and temporal authority, though indeed Henry
VIII had made the rule of church and kingdom one and the same. Still, Hobbes did not refer
to history for his precepts about the state; yet he was squarely engaged in history. Although
he has suggested that Hobbes sought an audience among the Scottish Engagers during the
Civil War, Quentin Skinner demonstrates how Hobbes applied a quasi mathematical logic to
the formation of the state.45 In contrast, Michael Goodhart declares Hobbes to be a royalist,
and Leviathan to be a defence of monarchy.46 This would seem to contradict Hobbes’s
willingness to assign sovereignty to an assembly; his actual intentions are undiscoverable, but
it would be possible for him both to hold royalist sympathies and to allow a theoretical
sovereignty in a legitimate assembly. Hobbes’s sovereign, not being the result of natural
processes, is established by the authorization of the realm. Much has been written about the
unhistorical nature of the political contract, a fiction which assumes that those living within a
realm consent to the establishment of the authority within it. This was clearly not the case
during the turbulent times through which Hobbes had lived, but it was in the interests of all
who desired a peaceful life that they should submit their political liberties to an unanswerable,
overriding authority called the sovereign. The authorization of the sovereign, as representative
of the people, constitutes the people as a state:
A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person,
Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in
particular. For it is in the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented,
that maketh the Person One. And it is the Representer that beareth the Person, and but
one Person. And Unity, cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude.47
The unity of the sovereign rests in an artificial person, which unites an assembly as a possible
sovereign in one authority. As far as the subjects, or the ‘represented’, are concerned, the
sovereign’s authority is unquestionable and unassailable. As with Bodin, the sovereign is
answerable to the laws of nature, and nature’s God, alone.48
As J. G. A. Pocock has argued, Hobbes accounted for the nasty and brutish life of the
people in his times as a condition of the second Fall of humankind, since the people of the
Book repudiated the direct rule of God with the installation of Saul as King of Israel. They
were now living through an interregnum until God should again restore his ‘fallen’ people by
taking direct command.49
We saw in the case of Bodin that his theory of sovereignty was propounded in the face
of resistance propaganda circulated by Huguenot authors. Julian H. Franklin has usefully
collated three of them: the Francogallia; the Right of magistrates; and the Vindiciae contra
tyrannos. The first appeals to the freedom of Gallic tribes before their subjection to Roman
colonial rule; at that time the kings were constituted by the tribes and were answerable to
them. Yet Hotman goes beyond an argument for restraining kings towards a theory of
‘absolute popular control’50 — revolutionary indeed in the times. In general the Huguenot
tracts appeal to Roman law and Jewish-Christian scripture to make monarchs beholden to the
will of the people.51 The Vindiciae, for example, bristles with Old Testament references to
kings’ subjection to the will of God for the good of the people, as well as to the authority of
Roman law.52 If McIlwain’s interpretation of Bodin’s ‘potestas’ is correct there should be
8
little exception to the Huguenot theory of popular resistance to, authoritarian power, yet we
know that resistance was seen as the cause of instability.
So too with Hobbes: the Civil War which hardened his approach to sovereignty also
produced notable British theories opposed to the divine authority of kings by a stronger
appeal to scripture. The Scottish divine, Samuel Rutherford, elevated the law above human
agency. Rutherford says that the ‘Law hath a supremacy of constitution above the King’,53
and places limits on royal power. John Coffey identifies in Rutherford three contributions to
proto-liberal thought which subsequently developed under the nurture of John Locke: popular
sovereignty, resistance theory, and the rule of law.54 Both the people and the Parliament are
understood to be above the king, and the Parliament is obliged to act ‘if the King turn
Tyrant’.55 Rutherford begins with the sociability of humans and the idea that ‘there is no
reason in Nature, why one Man should be King and Lord it over another’; the ‘power of
creating a man a King, is from the people’; and so the ‘power of Government, by the light of
nature must be radically and originally, in a Communitie’. Kings are not divine, and kingship
itself is scarcely essential.56 Even more famously, John Milton found ample precedent in the
scriptures for the deposition of the tyrannical king.57 This kind of argument continued into
the era of the eighteenth century non-conformist divines excluded from all manifestations of
the Establishment after the restoration of Charles II. Their complaints against aristocratic
government took a distinctly democratic turn. Richard Price, who crossed swords vigorously
with Edmund Burke over the French assertion of liberties, declared that ‘government is
conceived to be an agency for executing the will of the people.’58
Hobbes’s formulation, admitting of an assembly as sovereign, could scarcely have
objected to the notion of parliamentary sovereignty, which, under the fiction that the unified
persona gives to such a body, in turn opens a path to popular sovereignty — even considering
what a parliament did to a king in 1649. Yet,
The theory of the divine right of kings and Hobbes’s more sophisticated utilitarianism
are alike rationalizations of this fundamental fact, the acknowledgement of the
authority of the monarch. The significance of the theory is that the source of authority
and the source of determinateness in law are the same. In the person of the monarch
there is a coincidence, not otherwise found in politics, between what Jellinek has
called the social and the juristic aspect of the state. The social fact that matters is that
men obey the king, the juristic fact is that the law is what the king commands.59
One working out of Hobbes’s view that ‘law is the word of him that by right hath command
over others’ was the pronouncement of John Austin’s, viewing law as command: ‘If a
determinate human superior, not in the habit of obedience to a like superior, receive habitual
obedience from the bulk of a given society, that determinate superior is sovereign in that
society, and the society (including the superior) is a society political and independent.’60
Austin’s approach is of the essence of a legal positivism traceable ultimately to Jeremy
Bentham. His attempt at a characterization of sovereignty is a mere statement of observable
fact: in a stable society people habitually obey the political authority. The more interesting
question is what makes it stable? And why do people obey? And what happens when things
become unstable, and dissolution threatens the political community? Austin is apparently
uninterested in these questions; law is a command, and his sovereign is absolute. Presumably
some kind of coercion is required to impose conformity between the ‘bulk’ of habitual
observers and the few who are (habitually?) disobedient, but neither does this matter detain
Austin.61 The appeal of his notion of sovereignty is its straightforward simplicity. The value
of it lies in the fact, as with Hobbes, ‘that sovereignty is the standard by which we know
whether a given rule is law or not’.62
With both Hobbes and Austin, the sovereign is absolved from total authoritarianism
by the possibility of the authority residing in one or more persons. Despite Hobbes’s aversion
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to ‘democraticall gentlemen’, ‘democracy was theoretically acceptable’ in his terms’.63 In the
democratic era that possibility may be progressively extended, eventually to embrace all adult
persons. Hobbes’s sovereignty is retained in all its absoluteness, but it now becomes the
quality of the sovereign people. The roles of sovereign persons now become central, and they
are regulated according to certain rules. It is only as they conform to these rules that the
persons in authority can be obeyed as sovereign. In this way A. D. Lindsay vests sovereignty,
as embedded in the rules that regulate the exercise of sovereign authority, in the constitution
of the state. Obedience ultimately depends on a high level of trust in the constitution.64
In the end, all legitimate roads lead to popular sovereignty.
Sovereignty has had a significant history in the study of International Relations.
Bodin’s conception is seen to have its internal dimension, relating to domestic authority, and
external, concerning relations between states. Perhaps IR has tended to reify states without
regard to their shifting borders, their uncertain and changing authority, and in some cases their
uncertain relation to more dominant neighbours.65 The settlement of territories under the
Treaties of Westphalia of 1648 became for many a nodal point in the study of sovereignty.
These were directly related to the wars of religion that had so perturbed Bodin and Hobbes.
The treaties settled the Thirty Years War, essentially a conflict between the Holy Roman
Empire and the rulers of territories within it. The logic of Westphalia is traceable back to the
attack on the Roman Church by Martin Luther, given that the Reformation was initially set
off by a revolt against the exploitative policies of an imperial church exercising temporal
authority over the lands of Europe. Specifically Luther rejected the predatory sale of
indulgences, arguing in purely theological terms that salvation could not be bought and sold,
and that earning merit by ‘good works’ was an heretical illusion. Luther argued that the
Church had no business at all in exercising temporal authority, and in this he was followed by
many German princelings. He promoted a division between spiritual and temporal
‘regiment’. The spiritual had no interest in coercive power, while temporal authority required
the back-up of ‘the sword’ to keep the peace. According to J. N. Figgis, ‘by Protestantism the
limits of society are narrowed to the nation or the territorial estate, while its nature is more
that of a State than a Church’.66 Luther is accorded pivotal status in the evolution of the
modern state by Figgis: ‘The unity and universality and essential rightness of the sovereign
territorial State, and the denial of every extra-territorial or independent communal form of
life, are Luther’s lasting contribution to politics’.67 More than that, Luther’s radical doctrine
of ‘the priesthood of all believers’ elevated the ordinary person to an undreamt of plane,
reinforcing the sense of individual worth that had been fostered by the Athenian democrats
and the early Christian churches.68 In Lutheran spirit, protestant princes revolted against the
Holy Roman Empire that continued to uphold the temporal authority of the Church. The
ensuing war was bloody and painful, and a temporary settlement was reached by the Treaty of
Augsburg of 1655, under which was coined the famous formula, cuius regio, eius religio:
each territory should adopt the religion of its ruler. Augsburg did nothing to finalize
theological disputes; it did allow disaffected religionists to emigrate, and it adjudicated on
some legal disputes over church property,69 but did not prevent incursions into princely
territories from those wanting to defend the religious freedoms of persons who did not
conform to the ruler’s religion. It took the second round at Westphalia to settle the war.
Although clearly the treaties of 1648 did not create the idea of the sovereign state, they
effectively challenged the ambitions of the emperor to interfere with local princely
authorities. They brought an end to religious intervention in the internal affairs of the
sovereign states of Europe. The Pope Innocent X declared the treaties null and void, but to no
avail.70 The provisions of the Westphalian treaties had radical influence not only in religion,
but also in political and social terms. They abrogated the right of the prince to determine the
religion of his subjects, they established a distinction between the private and the public
realms, and in effect made the states secular orders. They set up ‘a secular, denominationally
neutral procedure to adjudicate religious disputes that only allowed secular arguments based
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on the treaties’ rules in the adjudication process, excluding religious reasoning from the
courts’.71
Challenges to sovereignty
Yet it is the lingering stench of absolutism that continues to give sovereignty a bad name.
The challenges are mounted on both philosophical and practical (prudential) grounds. To
some, sovereignty is vitiated by imprecision and variety in its applications. As Louis Henkin
has observed: ‘sovereignty is a bad word, not only because it has served terrible national
mythologies; in international relations, and even in international law, it is often a catchword, a
substitute for thinking and precision.’72 The controversy over its use has raged long and hard.
Jacques Maritain, for example, taxes Bodin for making his sovereign to transcend ‘the
political whole just as God transcends the cosmos’, that is, ‘ruling the entire body politic from
above’.73 So too with Hobbes, the image of the sovereign as a ‘mortal god’ places the ruler
above the realm. Maritain finds the concept of sovereignty to confer a claim to supreme and
independent power as a natural and unalienable right, and that that supremacy is both absolute
and transcendent; all this gives the sovereign an uncontrolled coercive power over subjects.
This inevitably clashes with the autonomy of the body politic which ‘derives from its nature
as a perfect or self-sufficient society’.74 Rousseau’s fictitious general will projected the idea
of sovereignty onto nascent democratic communities, so insulating the people from the
restraints of natural law which by rights conferred their autonomy in the first place. It left no
room for the individual conscience for self-expression according to a sense of right.
Sovereignty boils down to nothing but absolutism, and cannot rule a political community
because ‘no earthly power is the image of God and deputy for God’. For Maritain, ‘The two
concepts of Sovereignty and Absolutism have been forged together on the same anvil. They
must be scrapped together’;75 while Stanley Benn argued that there was no reason to retain ‘so
Protean a word’.76
Bertrand de Jouvenel objected that the idea of sovereignty was nothing but a
pernicious ‘springboard to Power’: ‘The theory of a divine sovereignty led to absolute
monarchy; the theory of popular sovereignty led at first to parliamentary supremacy, and
finally to plebiscitary absolutism.’77 De Jouvenel joins the critics of Rousseau, who,
disregarding Rousseau’s passion for liberty, assign to his sovereignty a destabilizing, yet
unanswerable, tyranny:
And now we begin to see that popular sovereignty may give birth to a more
formidable despotism than divine sovereignty. For a tyrant, whether he be one or
many, who has, by hypothesis, successfully usurped one or the other sovereignty,
cannot avail himself of the Divine Will, which shows itself to men under the forms of
a Law Eternal, to command whatever he pleases. Whereas the popular will has no
natural stability but is changeable; so far from being tied to a law, its voice may be
heard in laws which change and succeed each other. So that a usurping Power has, in
such a case, more elbow room; it enjoys more liberty, and its liberty is the name of
arbitrary power.78
The study of international relations has raised increasing doubts about the value of
sovereignty in analyzing the relations between and among states. Much controversy
surrounds the retention of the Westphalian idea as the backdrop for examining the relations
among states. Westphalia was said to have established territoriality as the standard for
recognizing a state, from which all extra-territorial authority was excluded. It was also said to
have established the status of a political entity within the international system.79 The realist
school, characterized by the writings of such as von Clausewicz, Morgenthau, Kennan and
Kissinger, took Westphalia to imply an anarchy among states, while David A. Lake argues
that Westphalia established ‘hierarchy’ within states while proclaiming anarchy among them.
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Lake’s ‘new sovereignty’ requires the extension of hierarchy to the international system, to
take into account the realities of colonization and neo-imperialism.80 On the other hand,
Richard A. Falk finds the Westphalian description to be ‘incoherent’, in that it combines a
territorial/juridical logic of equality with the geopolitical/hegemonic’ logic of inequality, thus
implying a hierarchy from the outset.81
Falk claims that returning to Westphalia continues to supply conflicting reference
points. Although it originated as a European settlement, it subsequently encompassed the
globe by extension through the demands of decolonized states in Asia, Africa and the Pacific
to be accorded full sovereignty.82 That Westphalia retains its descriptive force is evident from
the alleged ‘return to Westphalia’ as a characterization of the emerging reassertions of
nationalism within the European Union: ‘Europe's postmodern experiment in shared
sovereignty has so far lasted 60 years. Now the bargain is unravelling as governments once
again separate narrow national from wider mutual interests. The world has globalised, but
politics remains local. Europe's states are responding to domestic pressures by seeking to
reclaim Westphalian independence.’83
Globalization
The chief perceived threat to the validity of sovereignty theory now comes from the
phenomenon of ‘globalization’. The burgeoning strength of international markets, the flow of
international capital, the trans-national power of banks and other financial institutions all
seem to penetrate state borders with ease, and are often seen to dictate economic policy to
weary governments, a compromising of state sovereignty. The threat to move business offshore, always a menace to local jobs markets and the so-called ‘flight of capital’ as a coercive
measure of political destabilization all raise questions about the continuing force of state
sovereignty. The attacks on New York and Washington in September, 2011, ‘made a
mockery of our sovereignty’84 and forced a change in perspective from national to global
security, drawing the United States into a deliberate quest for global military dominance.85
Non-political factors also assail the integrity of the sovereignty theory:
It could hardly escape even casual observers that global warming recognizes no
sovereign territory, that AIDS carries no passport, that technology renders national
boundaries increasingly meaningless, that the Internet defies national regulation, that
oil and cocaine addiction circle the planet like twin plagues and that financial capital
and labor resources, like their anarchic cousins crime and terror, move from country to
country with ‘wilding’ abandon without regard for formal or legal arrangements-acting informally and illegally whenever traditional institutions stand in their way.86
Democratic realism may sound like an alarming contradiction in terms when applied to
international relations, especially when attempts to inject democratic institutions into
countries that have no tradition of them, and by military means, violates the Aristotlelian
association of democratic government with the preexisting ethos of a people. As Lake argues,
American interventions of an imperialist mode contravene the moral purpose of the modern
state. He asserts that Americans have little idea that their geopolitics are in fact an example of
imperialism, when troops are deployed on foreign soil, when military bases are set up on
allies’ territory, and when preemptive strikes are threatened and carried out. The use of
‘drone’ unmanned aircraft is widely seen as an invasion of another’s sovereignty, especially
in the case of Pakistan. The murder of Osama bin Laden, though welcomed by many as a just
retribution, was surely a vitiation of the principles of justice by which the United States
Administration purported to stand.
As opposed to realist objections, a further eroding of the concept of sovereignty is
sometimes seen in the borderless action for human rights, called ‘human rights
globalization’.87 There is a large number of aid and benevolent associations, ranging from
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church societies and the International Red Cross and the Red Crescent, agencies like World
Vision and Plan, and Amnesty International to the organization that colourfully incorporates
globalization into its name: Médicins Sans Frontières. The United Nations Organization
gives some observers hope for a future trans-national or world government, but in particular,
its Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 implants covenants that, when ratified by
participating polities, modify political behavior within those nations.88 The ‘ever-growing
number of resolutions and covenants, covering almost every aspect of human life and human
relations’ testifies to a growing potential for intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign
states. Michael Jacobsen and Stephanie Lawson, citing Papua New Guinea as an example,
suggest that a universal human rights regime may sustain the individuality of small
communities almost lost within the territory of much larger states.89 A universal commitment
to human rights implies intervention on behalf of the international comity of nations into
states where regimes have violated human rights, through torture or genocide. There has been
much international breastbeating about the failure of the international ‘community’ to
intervene in timely fashion to protect human rights in Srebrenica, Kosovo and Rwanda. The
problem extends back to late intervention in the Second World War against Nazi racial
persecutions and genocide, and the Russian murder of millions of its own citizens. Shaun
Narine outlines the problem of human rights intervention in ‘subaltern’ states — ‘the weak,
overlooked majority states of the international system’; often emerging from colonial
domination, certain young states are asserting their national sovereignty in the face of external
criticism, and there is sympathy for them in that they are still in the throes of nationbuilding.90 There is a growing consensus that intervention is acceptable as long as the
intention is only to prevent human suffering, that military intervention is used only in the last
resort, that the response be measured and limited, and that it must have a reasonable
expectation of success.91 In the case of intervention in the ‘subaltern’ states, there is a danger
that it would be seen as a return of colonial paternalism. Narine thinks the American
intervention in Iraq, based on the pretext that America had to protect itself from the
illusionary threat of weapons of mass destruction, could well have set back the case for
humanitarian intervention a long way.
ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, was founded in 1967 as a
regional non-aggression pact based on a strong doctrine of Westphalian sovereignty. The
member nations were fiercely opposed to any external intervention in member states’ affairs,
and led in the debate by Malaysia’s Dr Mahathir Mohamad, were inclined to treat any
suggestion of intervention as a western colonialist plot.92 ASEAN was embarrassed by the
admission of Myanmar and by its continued violation of human rights, so that the edifice of
stout resistance to external intervention began to crack. Moreover, its moral certitude on the
question was undermined when the members, fearful of straining relations with the American
superpower, failed to denounce the United States’ illegal and unauthorized invasion of Iraq.93
On the other hand, a small tribe in the Simbu region of Papua New Guinea, on
receiving information about human rights issues in the outside world, may relate them to their
own internal customary code and use it to reinforce their cultural identity. Correspondingly, a
‘viable’ human rights regime needs to be ‘sufficiently flexible to allow for the
accommodation of considerable cultural diversity’.94 Whether such developments involve the
‘marginalization’ of sovereignty is another matter, and we are yet to see how sovereignty can
be usefully employed within these wider developments.
As Jacobsen and Lawson aver, cosmopolitanism may offer a different vision of
international life.95 It is true that the ancient Cynics proffered cosmopolitan citizenship — of
the world — as a direct assault on the idea of the state, as far as it had developed in the
ancient world. It implied a rejection of both the political authority and the social way of life
of the polis. The philosophy advised a contraction of desires so that the mind and body would
avoid the pain of deprivation when otherwise desires were not fulfilled. For all the reason and
dignity we have discerned in the classical polis of the democracy, the spread of the
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Macedonian empire, overturning traditional norms of society, redistributing wealth,
transporting military recruits to different lands and different customs and creating new classes
according to wealth gained in imperial plunder, wrought huge social upheavals. ‘To no
longer be the citizen of an independent city-state implied the loss of the traditional bonds of
Greek ethics’.96 The old ideals of the polis were breaking down, and life for many became
rootless and insecure.97 A powerful response was to seek security out of one’s own inner
resources, and in many cases this involved a radical attack on the rules and customs of the
surrounding society. The legendary Diogenes so contracted his horizons that he withdrew
from society altogether, living on the barest necessities, including his own bareness, and
harmonizing with the nature of the cosmos. The title ‘citizen of the world’, apparently coined
by Diogenes, was more than likely a badge of rejection of the local community. For many of
the new philosophers, who took Socrates as a model, the resort to the inner resources of
human reason was a watered-down version of the lifelong search for wisdom as engaged in by
Socrates and Plato.
The idea of freeing oneself from unnatural desires was inherited by the Stoics, whose
founder, Zeno, follower of Crates the cheerful cynic, wished to express joy in submission to
the natural world. This was never more exuberantly expressed than in Cleanthes’s ‘Hymn to
Zeus’. Inner reason taught that conflict was useless and a demeaning of the human person:
‘what is necessary for self-sufficiency the wise man already has — so there is no point
fighting over it’.98 The cosmopolitan was at heart a pacifist.
In a new enthusiasm (a very non-Stoic word) for a borderless humanitarian concern
for human welfare, Stoicism has continued to undergo successive regenerations, as in the
eighteenth century with figures like Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and Viscount
Bolingbroke.99 According to Lisa Hill, the Stoics were the first cosmopolitans and the first
universalists: ‘we are all fundamentally equal, members of a universal community by virtue
of our common humanity’. Moreover, fellowship of the world-state ‘is morally and
ontologically prior to the positive republic of people’.100 Of course there is no world state,
but perhaps this is no more a fiction than the notion of sovereignty itself, and both are useful.
Martha Nussbaum invests much hope for the common good in Stoic cosmopolitanism
as moderated to the modern world by Kant.101 The Stoic ideal was to see a common dignity
in all humanity through their endowment with reason. Each Stoic was a ‘citizen of the world’
and had to accommodate this belief to the realities of statehood and empire. Nussbaum relies
more on the Roman version of stoicism than on the Greek. Rome was an expansionist state,
and the Stoic there had less interest in withdrawing from society than contributing honourably
to its good. The Stoic virtue of indifference to pain and individual suffering suited the
endurance required of soldier or statesman. The Roman Stoic would still proclaim him or
herself a citizen of the world, but that remained a worthy fiction. It is uplifting to read what
Roman Stoics wrote, but we need to remind ourselves that the Romans were, republic and
empire, unremittingly ruthless.102
To be practical in applying cosmopolitan ideals, Nussbaum argues that, for example,
wherever children can be successfully taught indifference to race and to have goodwill
towards neighbours, that is a Stoic triumph.103 The problem with this approach is that it is
rootless, and in a deep sense, groundless. For in her anxiety to avoid teleologies (a surprising
stance for a staunch Aristotelian), Nussbaum denatures Stoicism by removing it from its
foundations. The base of Stoicism is its discovery of reason in the fabric of the universe, and
it is directly in response to that universal reason, called Providence, that the Stoic discerns
reason in the being of his or her own person.104 As Nussbaum declares: ‘In a sense there is a
special dignity and freedom in the choice to constitute our community as universal and moral
in the face of a disorderly and unfriendly universe – for then we are not following anyone
else's imperatives but our very own.’105 This is a worthy humanist position, but it is not
Stoicism. The logos, the principle of reason in the human person, in the universe and in the
order of human relationships, is from the first invested with divine fire.106 As the revered
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hymn of Cleanthes exults:
Chaos to thee is order: in thine eyes
The unloved is lovely, who didst harmonize
Things evil with things good, that there should be
One Word (logos) through all things everlastingly,
One Word — whose voice alas! The wicked spurn;
Insatiate for the good their spirits yearn:
Yet seeing see not, neither hearing hear
God’s universal law, which those revere,
By reason guided, happiness who win.107
Nussbaum would scarcely be impressed by a long recitation of Stoic writers who show that
their philosophy is grounded in reason as the principle of all created being. Her approach
signifies a modernist disregard for the primitive, which extends to all who allude ‘to
providence as at least a practical postulate, a reasonable hope’.108
The discovery of
ungrounded reason in individual persons is an individuating tendency, and arguably less
conducive to a cosmopolitan sodality than that afforded by an institutionalized belief system.
As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, along with Vico, all our moral ideals ‘are nowhere to be
found except as embodied in the historical lives of particular social groups’, given ‘expression
in institutionalized practice as well as in discourse…’109
An obvious fact about the modern world, however, is the rapid growth of international
religious institutions. Many of its new manifestations are hostile responses to modernism in
the form of fundamentalist organizations which are a negation of Nussbaum’s appeal to
reason in their submission to the authority of certain established texts kept immune from
scholarly interpretation. Nevertheless, they are an unavoidable given in the contemporary
cosmos, and their interaction, often uncomfortable, with social and political institutions
constitutes a widespread cause of social disruption urgently in need of addressing by political
authorities. Yet their very cosmopolitanism potentially fills a void that a rootless stoicism
(also in fact a religion) has left.110 As Joseph Camilleri advises, when one makes a salutary
distinction between the ‘the spiritual culture of religion’ and its material culture, one finds
that all the global religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism
share with western liberalism ‘a sense of the dignity of human life, a commitment to human
fulfillment, and a concern for standards of rightness in human conduct’.111 If the prophetic
and ethical teachings of the great religions are taken seriously, they supply all the desired
attributes of Cynicism and Stoicism. Indeed, there is a close historical affinity between the
Cynicism and Stoicism of antiquity and the Abrahamic faiths,112 and in the latter case,
ongoing global institutions are available for exploring these connections, and provide the
basis for fruitful dialogue. One obstacle to fruitful dialogue in the west is an obstinate
liberalism that, taking the doctrine of the separation of church and state to unnecessary
extremes, inhibits potentially healthful channels of communication. Which brings us back to
the state.
The persistence of sovereignty
Despite the flow of commentary that asserts that philosophical cosmopolitanism, the
international market economy and global institutions have undermined the state, the reality is
that states persist and are no less a feature of human life than they ever were.113 Humane
cosmopolitanism has much to teach us. Wherever states exert a despotic control in order to
persecute their own or neighbouring populations, they are rightly subject to international
scrutiny, to sanctions where appropriate and effective, and to intervention in the last resort. If
we say, as we argue here, that sovereignty means responsibility, and above all responsibility
15
for human dignity and welfare, then it would be fair to say that such regimes as invite
intervention have themselves dissolved their own sovereignty. True sovereignty would be in
accord with cosmopolitan understandings of what it is to be human.
Humane cosmopolitanism instructs us that in each person in the world there is an
irreducible human dignity. The timeless lessons of great Aristotle should not be lost here,
however. A person’s human dignity is nurtured in association with other human beings. It is
in the concreteness of human relationship that our humanity is formed. Aristotle saw the
concrete circumstances of human life to be focused on the family and the household, the
village, and the community as embodied in the polis. The city-state was the pinnacle of
association in his world. It did not mean that all other associations were excluded. Aristotle,
as we have seen, gave special attention to the metics, the resident aliens in Athens, which
acknowledged the existence of their homelands. Indeed he was one of them, and in any case
the polis in his analysis was a generic term. His school famously studied the ‘constitutions’
of one hundred and forty- two cities. In a limited sense, his polis was a cosmopolitan ideal.
The polis was at the peak of his system because it was the climactic association that included
all types of people, with their different philosophies and their different aspirations in life. Yet
it subjected them all to its discipline, enabling them to live together as neighbours and in
friendship. That this was an ideal was obvious from the internal divisions and conflicts that
took place within the cities, and these in themselves made ‘sovereignty’ (or for Aristotle to
kurion) necessary. The polis was an association of ‘reciprocal and varied parts’, ideal in
combining unity with difference. In the praxis of building this unity human personality was
shaped:
If we hold that behind and beyond the production of law by the state there is a
process of personal activity and personal development in its members, we may go on
to say that the production should itself be drawn into the process. In other words, we
may argue that the productive effort of the state, the effort of declaring and enforcing
a system of law, should also be a process in which, and through which, each member
of the state is spurred into personal development, because he [or she] is drawn into
free participation in one of the greatest of all secular human activities.114
In contrast to the polis, the modern state can be a vast territorial expanse, yet offer a sense of
identity and membership. In more intimate states the Aristotelian notion of friendship can
still be a possibility. As Michael Walzer writes: ‘it is only as members somewhere that men
and women can hope to share in all the other social goods — security, wealth, honour, office,
power — that communal life makes possible’.115 States are not withering away. They may
be undermined, their procedures may be compromised, they may be rendered defenceless by
external attack, but they are still to be dealt with. It is worrying how often we hear that the
sovereignty of states is undermined when, for example, American drone aircraft are deployed
unauthorized in foreign territory; but it would be better if we described the United States’
sovereignty as under threat by its irresponsible behavior. If we took what has been said about
cosmopolitanism seriously, we should say that a sovereign regime, legibus solutus, is
nevertheless philosophically responsible not only to its own people, but also to all humankind.
Global institutions act on and through states. It takes state authorities to ratify international
treaties. It takes state authorities to honour treaty obligations. It takes states to regulate (or to
decide not to regulate) the economic activity within their territories of international financiers
and market operators. Undoubtedly such transnational institutions exert enormous pressure
on governments, often through their willing accomplices within states, but they do not thereby
obliterate them or dissolve sovereignty.
Above all, states are required for internal security. The classical characteristic of the
state, that it assumes the monopoly of force within a territory, still applies. Citizens must be
16
defended from violence and other antisocial (when illegal) behavior. The monopoly does not
mean that the state can literally abolish the use of all weapons, but it certainly can declare
what weapons are legitimate, exercising the right to confiscate illegal weapons when they are
discovered, and punishing illegal use of weapons. Its sovereignty needs to stand firm against
the most unwelcome of cosmopolitan phenomena, the international drugs and weapons trades.
The classical notion of the state as established at Westphalia still obtains; historically,
the state set aside competing authorities, namely the church, private estates, commercial
enterprises, robber bands and other criminal organizations or individuals. In that exogenous
pressures can affect the lives of individual persons directly, the state still has a responsibility
to repel foreign interference.
The best way to view sovereignty in the modern world is to characterize it as
responsibility.116 Sovereignty denotes to whom one must turn when protection is needed. Its
responsibility is for the whole of its citizen body and also even for others who have somehow
forfeited their rights as citizens; citizenship rights do not at bottom encompass all human
dignity — the prisoner and the slave are still (despite Aristotle in this instance) human and
worthy of personal development.117 Providing security for the whole is a concept without
borders, and the current fetish with ‘border protection’ is a diminution of sovereignty as
responsibility. For if our sovereignty is to take cognizance of the human dignity of all people,
regardless of territorial origin, it must treat aliens with the respect also owing to citizens. This
does not imply unconditional admission to all the rights and privileges of citizenship, since no
state could afford to embrace the entire world in its own structures, but it implies a respect
that does not run to untried imprisonment and ruthless deportation.
Responsibility for the security of the whole is open ended. The so-called nightwatchman state of the classical liberal was intended to confine its activities to the
maintenance of a police force to control the criminal, and a military force to repel the invader.
Yet security is a more complex thing than outward protection from physical attack. A
person’s security — and let us recruit this concept to enhancing the overall wellbeing of the
human person — depends on a living income, food and shelter, health care, job security,
support in acquiring work, a living stipend when work is unavailable, safe and stable
conditions at work, adequate provision for rest and recreation, education for the development
of the mind and secondarily for the possibility of achieving higher levels of work. T. H.
Green’s critique of classical liberalism extended liberalization to a broader construction of
security than the liberal had hitherto admitted. It could even extend to the regulation of such
‘social evils’ as excessive strong drink, gambling and (nowadays) smoking in public
enclosures — quite evidently matters damaging to family life and individual health.118 Here
we enter into a contentious area. It does not take a ‘classical liberal’ to object to state
interference in domestic life, or its deciding that harm is being caused to people where a John
Stuart Mill might declare that there is no harm. Mining that contaminates streams and ponds,
milling and generation that causes pollution of the atmosphere, the contentious newish
industry ‘fracking’ (hydraulic fracturing of rock layers), and the extraction of coal-seam gas
that causes depletion of groundwater resources and contaminates ‘associated water’, all
provoke legitimate dissent, and open the field wider to political contestation. Conservatives
of several stripes object to the so-called nanny state that seeks to regulate human behavior in
favour of a wider notion of security. Here politics enters in. By the legitimate processes of
contested government, people enter into a lively debate over the proper boundaries of state
action. Action is motivated by appeal to different philosophies, party principles or religious
beliefs, and is contested hotly by interest. Providing funds and services to the indigent
requires redistributing wealth from the rich. Regulating allegedly dangerous practices
requires restricting or closing certain industries, which may be expected to retaliate with all
17
the resources at their command. The structures of the sovereign state, one way or another,
provide means of filtering and sorting the various interests and providing ‘authoritative
allocation of values’. Embracing the people in the procedures that determine the outcomes of
political contestation means an investment in the worth of each person. Shaun Narine cites
The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, and its report on The
Responsibility to Protect, declaring that ‘Sovereignty implies a dual responsibility’; externally
in respect of other states’ sovereignty, and internally, ‘to respect the dignity and basic rights
of all the people within a state’. This is acknowledged as a minimalist standard, appropriately
so, given the document is about intervention.119 It is here contended that sovereignty as
responsibility may ideally expand the bounds of security to cover human dignity in all its
aspects.
Popular sovereignty in democracy and republic
In the end, the only meaningful sovereignty is popular sovereignty. As we saw with
Hobbes120 and Bodin, as interpreted by Althusius121 (and this would certainly apply to Locke
also, although he has not been considered in detail here because of space), the surrender of
individual rights depends on an act of voluntarism by the prospective subjects. Even Austin,
who invested sovereignty in the person or persons who were habitually obeyed, required the
act of obedience on the part of subjects for its constitution. The Calvinist dissenters in the
religious wars were explicit about the lodging of sovereignty with the people who inherited,
by ideological assertion and by a contest of arms, the divine right of participation in
sovereignty by reason of people’s claim to infinite value in the sight of God.
If the claims of humane cosmopolitanism are valid, and here it is accepted that they
are, then the only possible basis for sovereignty is the people: initially this applies to the
people of a territory, but it is argued here that the legitimacy of a sovereign also depends on a
humane respect for all persons.
Republic
The state as res populi was Cicero’s ringing statement.122 Res publica was a generic Roman
term for state, although it did not apply to the monarchy which the term was devised to
supplant; presumably another generic term, civitas (also meaning citizenship) would cover
that case. The explicit use of res publica res populi applied to an order designed to exclude
the possibility of a recurrence of kingship (although other fictitious terms were deployed to
cover its eventual return in the empire). As we saw at the outset, Cicero’s term was a
magnificent theoretical invention. Our problem in comparing it with the democracy
originating among the Greeks is that it applied to an actual state, and while popular
sovereignty was a convenient as well as high-sounding statement of the determination to be
ruled without kings, it applied to a highly stratified society in which the lower levels were
stringently excluded from public service and were denied many of the ordinary privileges of
citizenship, all combined in most cases with social inferiority and a grinding poverty. The
Roman aristocratic state — republic and empire alike — was notoriously ruthless to lesser
beings and towards the lower orders within the state. It is surprising, therefore, that
republican scholarship should still turn to Rome as the fount of liberties. It is true that some
glowing expressions of liberty emerged from the high culture of Rome, but in almost all cases
it was the worthy, the notable, the ‘wise’, the ‘optimate’ who was to enjoy the liberties of
Romanism to the full.123
Modern republican authors like Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit stand in a long
tradition of looking to Rome for inspiration.124 Among very many others, Machiavelli and
Montesquieu stand out. A recurring theme was the ‘balanced commonwealth’ or the ‘mixed
18
constitution’ that drew upon Polybius’s stylized and false assessment of the Roman republic,
which in turn drew on Aristotle’s recommendations for a stable state. The mixed constitution
took up the old harmony philosophy of the presocratics saying that balance and stability were
to be discovered in the combination and harmonization of extremes. A balance formed of a
mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy fooled people, like the emperor’s new
clothes, into not recognizing that the mixture denatured all three ‘basic’ types of government.
Machiavelli declared Rome to be a perfect state because of the mixture of the ‘elements’ (in
Polybius merê) of government.125 It was a recipe for conservatism and stability, an explicit
impediment to progress, whereas the original democracy was open ended and progressive in
its extension of benefits to the poorest citizens. The prescription was deeply set against the
democracy that it purported to embrace. Among the English dissenters, James Harrington
backed away from the democratic claims of the parliamentary faction by his appeal to
Machiavelli.126 Montesquieu fancifully declared that the Roman constitution was admirable
because it could always correct abuses of power.127 The Founders of the American republic
also looked to Rome with admiration, while they universally disparaged the diseases and
follies of the democracy of ancient Greece. Alexander Hamilton praised the balance of the
popular and the stratified centuriate assemblies at Rome as models for the modern world.128
The conservative pedigree of the republic over democracy was stamped by the English
philosopher, Michael Oakeshott. The neutralized republic in his view is ‘a manifold of rules
and rule-like prescriptions to be subscribed to in all the enterprises and adventures in which
the self-chosen satisfaction of agents may be sought’. By contrast politics necessarily
excludes ‘benevolent plans for the general betterment of [hu]mankind, for diminishing the
discrepancy between wants and satisfactions or for moral improvement…’ When it is ‘made
to qualify a performance or a policy’, democracy is no more than a ‘confidence trick’.129
Likewise Pettit affirms: ‘Modern republicans are bound to support some institutions…that
serve to guard against majoritarian threats.’130 It is difficult to see how Pettit’s project to
equate liberty as the condition of having no master (regardless of whether or not that master is
coercive) is not a species of conservative anarchism; it is certainly unfriendly to the
possibility of social and economic change to be wrought under a democratic regime. Much
more in accord with the notion of sovereignty under discussion here is democracy.
Democracy
Democracy within the state is very much akin to cosmopolitanism in the globe. In which case
cosmopolitanism is no threat to democracy, but embodies its foundation. For democracy
derives from the utmost investment in the absolute worth of every human individual. From
this assertion of individual dignity derives the autonomy of each adult person in good legal
standing. Those deprived of civil rights through due process are of no less worth as persons,
but for good reason restrictions may be placed on their autonomy. Philosophers like Hobbes
and Locke essayed great labours to explain how whatever total autonomy a person may enjoy
within the fictional ‘state of nature’, living in society requires certain compromises in the
pooling of rights for the common good. At the same time, democracy accords to individuals
as great a measure of autonomy as possible, and invites each to participate in the rule over
shared responsibilities. How this may be arranged varies through different formations, such
as assembly government to representative government elaborated through consultative and
deliberative procedures of various kinds. It is not possible here to survey the libraries of
analysis that explore the philosophical and institutional foundations of democracy. We may
return to the opening paragraphs to seek a foundational justification of democracy in the
original western examples of ancient Greece. Scholars like Giovanni Sartori, George Kateb
and Ian Shapiro have driven a wedge between ancient and modern forms of democracy,131 but
we do well to consider the relevance claimed for ancient democracy by such as Mogens
Herman Hansen, Moses I. Finley and Josiah Ober.132 Ober pointedly refers to ‘the disruptive
19
potential of classical democracy to challenge the assumptions of modern democratic
theory…’133
It has not been the purpose here to review the vast controversies over the character of
modern democracy. This paper has been concerned with the affinity between the
cosmopolitan ideal of intrinsic human worth and the democratic state. Pace Lisa Hill,134 in
truth the ideals we hold to be cosmopolitan are rooted in the state. It was Socrates’s statecraft
that charged the polis with nurturing the human spirit and improving the souls of the people.
The cosmopolitanism lately approved of in Cynic and Stoic philosophy was nurtured by
intellectual descendants of Socrates as they struggled to reorient themselves to unfamiliar
circumstances, but it was as a response to the state that they assumed their citizenship of the
world. Its true source lies in the sovereignty of the democratic state.
1
Cicero, De re publica, 1. 25. 39: ‘Est igitur, inquit Africanus, res publica res populi, populus
autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris
consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus.’
2
Ibid.
3
E. A. Judge, ‘”Res Publica Restituta”: A Modern Illusion?’ in J. A. S. Evans, ed., Polis and
Imperium. Studies in Honour of Edward Togo Salmon, Toronto, Hakkert, 1974, pp. 279-311;
Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, London, Oxford University Press, 1939.
4
Cicero De Legibus 3. 19
5
Cf. Richard Mulgan, ‘Aristotle’s Analysis of Oligarchy and Democracy’, in David Keyte
and Fred D. Miller Jr, eds, A Companion to Aristotle’s Politics, pp. 307-322, at pp. 316-318.
6
Aristotle, Politics, 6. 5. 1320al (trans. Carnes Lord) Chicago, Chicago University Press,
1984, p. 190.
7
M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983,
p. 36: ‘Liturgies [public service required of the rich] were compulsory and honorific at the
same time.’
8
Finley, ‘Athenian Demagogues’, Past and Present, vol. 21, 1962, p. 21.
9
Finley, Ancient World, p. 109.
10
Aristotle, Politics, 6. 2. 1291b30-37 (Lord trans. p. 125).
11
Gregory Vlastos, ‘Isonomia’, American Journal of Philosophy, vol. 74, no. 4, 1953, pp.
337-366, at p. 355; Vlastos, ‘The Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy’, Political
Theory, vol. 11, no. 4, 1983, pp. 495-516, at p. 505.
12
Aristotle, Politics, 6. 3. 1318b5.
13
Josiah Ober, ‘The Polis as a Society. Aristotle, John Rawls and the Athenian Social
Contract’, in M. H. Hansen, ed., The Greek City-State, Copenhagen, Munksgaard, 1993, pp.
129-160, at p. 144.
14
Thucydides, 2. 37. Of course the Funeral Speech of Pericles is a stylized version crafted by
the historian.
15
Victor Ehrenberg, The Greek State, London, Methuen, 2nd edn 1972, p. 42.
16
Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, London, Oxford University Press, 5th edn
1931, p. 380.
17
Vlastos, ‘Historical Socrates’, pp. 507-508.
18
Ober, ‘Polis as Society’, p. 132.
19
Vlastos, ‘The Religious Foundations of Democracy, Fraternity and Equality’, Journal of
Religion, vol. 22, no. 2, 1942, pp. 137-155, at p. 147.
20
Aristotle, Politics III, 1283b40-42, p. 106).
21
Ober, ‘Polis as Society’, pp. 131-132.
22
F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, London, Watts, 1966, p. 29.
23
Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998.
20
24
‘Old Oligarch’, Ps-Xenophon, ‘The Constitution of the Athenians’, in J. M. Moore, ed.,
Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy, London, Chatto & Windus, 1975, pp.
19-59.
25
Mogens Herman Hansen, ‘Reflections on the Number of Citizens Accommodated in the
Assembly Place on the Pnyx’, in Björn Forsén and Greg Stanton, eds, The Pnyx in the History
of Athens, Helsinki, Finnish Institute at Athens, 1996.
26
Finley, Ancient World, pp.60-1; cf. M. Cary, 'Athenian Democracy', History, vol.12 (1927),
pp. 206-14.
27
Finley, Ancient World, p. 80.
28
J. W. Allen, Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, London, Methuen, 1960, pp. 442443.
29
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1978, 2 vols, vol. 2: The Age of Reformation, pp. 284-285.
30
Jacques Maritain, ‘The Concept of Sovereignty’, in W. J. Stankiewitz, ed., In Defense of
Sovereignty, London, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 41-64, at pp. 44-45.
31
Skinner, Foundations vol. 1, p. 298.
32
See H. G. Koenigsberger, George L. Mosse and G. Q. Bowler, Europe in the Sixteenth
Çentury, London, Longman, 2nd edn 1989, pp. 338-339.
33
Allen, Political Thought, p. 443.
34
Jean Bodin, De Republica Libri Sex, Paris, 1686, 1. 8.
35
C. H. McIlwain, ‘Sovereignty Again’, Economica, no. 18, 1926, pp. 253-268, at pp. 253254, 260, and quoting Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, p. 106.
36
McIlwain, ‘Sovereignty’, p. 262.
37
Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad Vs McWorld, New York, Random House, 2001, p. xix.
38
A. P. D’Entreves, The Notion of the State, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967, pp. 99-100.
39
Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘Quentin Skinner’s Hobbes and the Neo-Republican Project’,
Modern Intellectual History, vol. 6, no. 2, 2009, pp. 343-367, at p. 350.
40
See e.g. D. D. Raphael, Hobbes. Morals and Politics, London, Allen & Unwin, 1977, pp.
33-35; Richard Tuck, Hobbes, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 68-70.
41
Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 13.
42
Ian Shapiro, ‘Reflections on Skinner and Pettit’, Hobbes Studies, vol. 22, 2009, pp.185-191,
at p. 191; cf. David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan. The Moral and Political Theory of
Thomas Hobbes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969, p. 166; on Hobbes’s approach to definitions
as ‘his notorious rhetorical gamesmanship’, see Collins, ‘Skinner’s Hobbes’, p. 349.
43
D’Entreves, Notion of the State, p. 106.
44
Hobbes, Leviathan, part 3, chapter 42 Lindsay ed. p. 283.
45
Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2008.
46
Michael Goodhart, ‘Theory in Practice. Quentin Skinner’s Hobbes, Reconsidered’, Review
of Politics, vol. 62, no. 3, 2000, pp. 531-561, at p. 548.
47
Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 16.
48
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
University of California Press, 1972, pp. 29-33.
49
J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, New York, Atheneum, 1973, p. 173; see
Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 41.
50
Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, p. 313.
51
Julian H. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century. Three
Treatises by Hotman, Beza and De Mornay, New York, Pegasus, 1969.
52
See the detailed apparatus as in the text edited by George Garnett, Vindiciae Contra
Tyrannos, or concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people
over a prince, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994; cf. Anne McLaren, ‘Rethinking
21
Republicanism: Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos in Context’, The Historical Journal, vol. 49, no.
1, 2006, pp. 23-52.
53
Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex, or the Law and the Prince, 1644, p. 230.
54
John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions — The Mind of Samuel
Rutherford, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 146-8, 187.
55
Ibid., p. 210.
56
Ibid., pp. 3, 10, 413, 94 respectively.
57
Milton, ‘The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’, [1649] in Martin Dzelzainis (ed.), Milton.
Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001.
58
Richard Price, as in ‘Introduction’ to D. O. Thomas (ed.), Price, Political Writings,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. x.
59
A. D. Lindsay, ‘Sovereignty’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series vol. 24,
1923-1924, pp. 235-254, at p. 241.
60
John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined [1832], W. Rumble, ed.,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
61
Lindsay, ‘Sovereignty’, p. 238.
62
Ibid.
63
Collins, ‘Skinner’s Hobbes’, p. 355.
64
Ibid., p. 242-244.
65
Terrell Carver, ‘Whither Westphalia?’, International Studies Review, vol. 13, 2011, pp.
552-553.
66
J. N. Figgis, Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius 1414-1625 [1907], New York,
Harper, 1960, p. 71.
67
Ibid., pp. 91-92.
68
G. Maddox, ‘Civic Humanism and Republican Virtue’, in David Headon, James Warden
and Bill Gammage, eds, Crown and Country. The Traditions of Australian Republicanism, St
Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1994, pp. 145-60, at p. 155.
69
Benjamin Straumann, ‘The Peace of Westphalia as a Secular Constitution’, Constellations,
vol. 15, no. 2, 2008, pp. 173-188, at p. 175-7.
70
See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. ‘Sovereignty’.
71
Straumann, ‘Secular Constitution’, p. 182.
72
Louis Henkin, ‘International Law: Politics, Values and Functions--General Course on
Public International Law' 216, Recueil des Cours de l'Academie de droit international de La
Haye 9, 1989, pp. 24-5, as quoted in Stephane Beaulac, ‘The social power of Bodin’s
“sovereignty” and international law’, Melbourne Journal of International Law, vol. 4, no. 1,
2003, p. 1.
73
Jacques Maritain, ‘The Concept of Sovereignty’, in W. J. Stankiewicz, ed., In Defense of
Sovereignty, New York, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 41-64, at p. 47, (emphasis in
original).
74
Ibid., pp. 51-53.
75
Ibid., pp. 62-64.
76
Stanley I. Benn, ‘The Uses of Sovereignty’, in Stankievicz , ed., in Defense of Sovereignty,
p. 85.
77
Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power. Its nature and the history of its growth, trans. J. F.
Huntington, Boston, Beacon Press, 1962, p. 27.
78
Ibid., pp. 42-43; cf. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, London, Secker
& Warburg, 1960.
79
Straumann, ‘Secular Constitution’, p. 173.
80
David A. Lake, ‘The New Sovereignty in International Relations’, International Studies
Review, vol. 5, 2003, pp. 303-323, at p. 303.
22
81
Richard Falk, ‘Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-Westphalia’, The Journal of Ethics,
vol. 6, 2002, pp. 311-352, at p. 312.
82
Ibid. pp. 313, 316.
83
Philip Stephens, ‘Europe’s Return to Westphalia’, Financial Times, 23 June, 2011.
84
Benjamin Barber, ‘Beyond Jihad vs. McWorld: On Terrorism and the New Democratic
Realism’ The Nation, vol. 274, no. 2, 2002, p. 11.
85
Falk, ‘Revisiting Westphalia’, p. 351.
86
Barber, ‘Beyond Jihad’, p. 11.
87
Falk, ‘Revisiting Westphalia’, p. 329.
88
Cf. Tod Moore, ‘Violations of Sovereignty and Regime Engineering: A Critique of the
State Theory of Stephen Krasner’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 44, 2009, pp.
497-511.
89
Michael Jacobsen and Stephanie Lawson, ‘Between Globalization and Localization: A Case
Study of Human Rights Versus State Sovereignty’, Global Governance, vol. 5, 1999 pp. 203219, at p. 204.
90
Shaun Narine, ‘Humanitarian Intervention and the Question of Sovereignty: the Case of
ASEAN’, Perspectives in Global Development and Technology, vol. 4, nos 3-4, 2005, pp.
465-485, at p. 468, and citing Mohammad Ayoob’s theory of ‘subaltern realism’.
91
Ibid., p. 473.
92
Cf. Lawson, The Failure of Democratic Politics in Fiji, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, p.
262.
93
Narine, ‘Humanitarian Intervention’, pp. 475-483.
94
Jacobsen and Lawson, ‘Globalization and Localization, p. 212.
95
Ibid., p. 205.
96
Ehrenberg, Man, State and Deity, London, Methuen, 1974, p. 99.
97
See e.g. W. W. Tarn, ‘The Social Question in the Third Century’, in J. B. Bury, E. A.
Barber, Edwyn Bevan and Tarn, The Hellenistic Age, New York, Norton, 1923, pp. 108-140.
98
Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1991, p. 51.
99
See e.g. P. H. Clark, ‘Adam Smith, Stoicism and religion in the Eighteenth Century’,
History of the Human Sciences, vol. 13, 2000, pp. 49-72; Lisa Hill, ‘The Case of Adam
Ferguson’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 62, no. 2, 2001, pp. 281-299.
100
Hill, ‘Classical Stoicism and a Difference of Opinion’, in Tim Battin (ed.), A Passion for
Politics, Frenchs Forest NSW, Pearson, 2005, p. 88.
101
Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political Philosophy,
vol. 5, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1-25.
102
Some of the most honoured Stoics were imperialist at heart; cf. Fred Dallmayr,
‘Cosmopolitanism: Moral and Political’, Political Theory, vol. 31, no. 3, 2003, pp. 421-442,
at p. 435.
103
Nussbaum, ‘Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, p. 22.
104
F. H. Sandbach, The Stoics, London, Chatto & Windus, 1975, pp. 79-82.
105
Nussbaum, ‘Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, p. 18.
106
Sandbach, Stoics, pp. 72-73.
107
Cleanthes, ‘Hymn to Zeus’, ll. 24-32, as quoted and translated in Jason L. Saunders, Greek
and Roman Philosophy After Aristotle, New York, The Free Press, 1966, pp. 149-150.
108
Nussbaum, ‘Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, p. 18.
109
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. A study in moral theory, London, Duckworth, 2nd
edn 1985, p. 265.
110
Cf. the efforts of Hans Küng to establish cosmopolitanism on an institutional
footing; in Dallmayr, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 422-425.
23
111
Joseph A. Camilleri, ‘Introduction’, in Luca Anceschi, Camilleri, Ruwan Palapathwala and
Andrew Wicking, eds, Religion and Ethics in a Globalizing World. Conflict, Dialogue and
Human Transformation, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 11.
112
Cf. F. Gerald Downing, Jesus and the Threat of Freedom, London, SCM Press, 1987.
113
John Hoffman, Sovereignty, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1998, pp. 11-20.
114
Ernest Barker, Principles of Social and Political Theory, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1951,
p. 208 (emphasis in the original).
115
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, New York, Basic Books, 1983, p. 63.
116
Cf. Narine, ‘Humanitarian Intervention’, p. 471.
117
For slaves ‘as the true archetypes of human greatness’ see Gregory Vlastos, ‘The Religious
Foundations of Democracy, Fraternity and Equality’ Part II, The Journal of Religion, vol. 22,
no. 2, 1942, pp. 137- 155, at p. 149.
118
Alberto de Sanctis, The ‘Puritan’ Democracy of T. H. Green, Exeter, Imprint Academic,
2005, pp. 75-128; Marian Sawer, The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia, Carlton,
Vic., Melbourne University Press, 2003.
119
Narine, ‘Humanitarian Intervention’, p. 471.
120
Hinsley, Sovereignty, p. 132.
121
Ibid., pp. 132-139.
122
See note 1.
123
G. Maddox, ‘The Limits of Neo Roman Liberty’ History of Political Thought, vol. 23, no.
3, 2002, pp. 418-431.
124
Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998; Philip
Pettit, Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government, New York, Oxford University
Press, 1997.
125
Machiavelli, The Discourses 1. 2, in P. Bondanella and M. Musa, eds, The Portable
Machiavelli, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979, p. 181; cf. Polybius, 6. 9. 11.
126
C. Blitzer, ed., The Political Writings of James Harrington, [1656] New York, Liberal
Arts Press, 1955, p. 61. Milton, however, was not entirely happy about the sagacity of the
masses, who could be ‘exorbitant and excessive’; quoted in Skinner, Liberty Before
Liberalism, p. 32.
127
Montesquieu, Consideration of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their
Decline [1734], trans. D. Lowenthal, New York, Free Press, 1965, p. 87.
128
Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, no. 34.
129
Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975, pp. 148-152,
193.
130
Pettit, Republicanism, p. 181.
131
Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Chatham, Chatham House, 1987,
pp. 288-9; George Kateb, ‘The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy,’ Ethics,
vol. 91, April, 1981, pp. 357-374; Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Gordon, in Shapiro and
Hacker-Gordon, eds, Democracy’s Value, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p.2.
132
See above nn. 7, 13, 25.
133
Ober, ‘What democracy meant to the Athenians (Demosthenes and Meidias)’, History
Today, vol. 44, no. 1, 1994, pp. 22-28.
134
See above at n. 95.