Popular Sovereignty versus Democracy: Or, How Rousseau Killed Democracy

• In Event: Historical Populisms and Contemporary Responses

Abstract

The democratic tradition is constituted by a dual commitment: to people’s political agency and their political equality. My thesis is that democratic theory went off the rails in the modern period thanks to its fusion with two other, distinct ideological currents: sovereignty theory as initially articulated by Bodin, and social contract theory, which was fused together with sovereignty theory in Hobbes. Rousseau’s subsequent fusion of these two commitments with the democratic tradition culminated in the subordination of political equality to political agency (political equality for Rousseau is merely instrumental to securing “civil” and “moral” freedom), and the equation of political agency with popular sovereignty. The turn to popular sovereignty replaces the previous conception of democratic agency—as people’s participation and influence in decision-making—with agency understood as consent, which, as Hobbes knew and Rousseau illustrates, is perfectly compatible with no popular participation or influence. The theory of popular sovereignty is at once the ideological source of democracy’s collapse into nationalism and populism and, by eviscerating genuine popular political agency qua participation and influence, elite capture of political institutions.

Author

• Arash Abizadeh, McGill University