In Our Time - Sovereignty

Episode Date: June 30, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the idea of Sovereignty, the authority of a state to govern itself and the relationship between the sovereign and the people. These ideas of external and internal sovereignty were imagined in various ways in ancient Greece and Rome, and given a name in 16th Century France by the philosopher and jurist Jean Bodin in his Six Books of the Commonwealth, where he said (in an early English translation) 'Maiestie or Soveraigntie is the most high, absolute, and perpetuall power over the citisens and subiects in a Commonweale: which the Latins cal Maiestatem, the Greeks akra exousia, kurion arche, and kurion politeuma; the Italians Segnoria, and the Hebrewes tomech shévet, that is to say, The greatest power to command.' Shakespeare also explored the concept through Richard II and the king's two bodies, Hobbes developed it in the 17th Century, and the idea of popular sovereignty was tested in the Revolutionary era in America and France. With Melissa Lane Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton UniversityRichard Bourke Professor in the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of Londonand Tim Stanton Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about In Our Time, and for recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 1576, the French political philosopher Jean Baudin set out his ideas about the nature of sovereignty in what became a landmark work, the six books of the Commonwealth. He was writing into time of great conflict in France, the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants and a few years before the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. With kings, princes, the Pope and aristocrats making overlapping claims for authority, Bowdown wanted to find the defining qualities of the worn supreme sovereign in a state.

His ideas about sovereignty drew on Aristotle and profoundly influenced later thinkers, such as Hobbes during the English Civil War, Russo ahead of the French Revolution, the leaders of the American Revolution, and we stop short of current affairs. Women to discuss the history of the idea of sovereignty are Melissa Lane, Class of 1943, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, Richard Burke, Professor in the History of Political at Queen Mary, University of London, and Tim Stanton, senior lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York. Melissa Lane, Bonner read about the ancient Greeks. What would you have found, though, that would have helped him in his political theory?

Of course, in ancient Greece and across the ancient world, we have sovereigns in the sense of monarchs. But what Bodan was also very struck by was that in the Greek democracies, we find what we can think of as popular sovereignty, where the people are sovereign. And the advantage of the people over monarchs is that they're not underage ever. They don't get senile. So they have more claim in some ways to be absolute, supreme, perpetual, and even indivisible, which were some of the key marks of sovereignty that Bodan identified. And also the Greeks set out the first, you'll tell me if I'm wrong, it might be the seventh, I don't know. Anyway, set out the first division that there was a monarchy, monarchical system, aristocratic system,

and a democratic system. There's three systems. They could be intermingled, they could intertwine, they could overlap, but these three were the three pillars of political theory. Yes, that's right. And then in Rome in particular, and anticipated in some Greek thought, there was the idea that perhaps you could have a mixed regime, which actually combined elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. So we see that in the Roman Republic. And there it's very interesting where sovereignty resides because we find in the Roman historians, sometimes the people are described as having maestas as one term for sovereignty. Sometimes it's the Senate. So, and that would lead Bodan and Hobbs to think that actually in these mixed regimes, it's a kind of fiction. There has to really be a

sovereign underneath what seems to be a divided arrangement of power. We slightly go before our horse to market here. Let's go back to Athens. What can you get an encapsulation of an idea of something like sovereignty that might have come out of the Athenian experience? I think it is the idea that the demos, the people, are courios and in the state. So they are in control. They are the masters of the political regime. And that means precisely that they're supreme, no one can overrule them. They're not accountable to anyone else. And those ideas of not being accountable, not being beholden to anyone else, I think are really at the center

of that idea of the people as in a sense sovereign. And as in many cases, the Romans took over and developed those ideas with the word you've once said, maestas, but also Sumum Imperium was another word that they had for what Bodai is calling sovereignty. Did they put any sort of spin on what the Greeks had done? Did they develop it or just accept it and get on with it? One of the things the Romans do, and we see this especially in Cicero, is develop more of a legal framework for thinking about how the people might entrust their sovereign powers to their rulers.

So the idea of the race publica, the race is actually conceived as a kind of property, and the people can entrust it, they can deposit it. And even in the Roman Empire, the people have to confer their powers on the emperor in order for the emperor to actually be sovereign. One of the things that Bodan had been, he'd been a monk, then he stopped being a monk. He was a classicist, and then he moved to be a lawyer and to part the parliament. The sovereignty was juridical. It wasn't a question of power. It was a completely different thing.

So I think that for Bodan is really interested in using. a method of history, especially in his first important work before the six books of the Commonwealth of universal history to say, even where people themselves didn't offer definitions of sovereignty, we can see this element of sovereignty in their legal arrangements. And he used that method to define it. Richard Berg, I briefly skipped over, Baudet. Can you tell us something more substantial about him? Okay. Well, Baudin was born in Aunger, southwest of Paris, in 15th. 1929.30, the precise date's not clear, and died towards the end of the century in 1596. As was briefly mentioned already, as a very young man, he joined the Carmelite Brotherhood as a monk.

There he would have received a detailed scholastic education, but he was actually released from his vows in 1549, and it's at that point that he embarked upon a legal career, or at least legal training, at the University of Toulouse. That was in the 1550s, but then, as you very briefly mentioned, in the 1560s he embarked upon a career as a public official as an advocate in the Parliament of Paris. And this new development in his career coincides with the descent of France into turmoil. The wars of religion are triggered in 1562 and last until two years after Bowdoin's death. so his writing is very much constructed against that background. Against that background, but do we know, Richard, do we know what prodded him to write these six books?

Was there any particular incident? Had he been driving towards it in his previous work? Well, I would say no particular incident. However, as a trained jurist with deep humanistic knowledge and a public official concerned with the fate of his Commonwealth, or the monarchy of France, he developed his theory of sovereignty very much as a means of staving off convulsion, if you like,

or the dissolution of the Commonwealth under pressure from religious and political faction. So it is, as it were, his preoccupations are triggered very much by contemporary events, but no one particular event. So how did it define sovereignty? Well, Baudas' theory of sovereignty is mostly developed in two works. One, the method for an easy understanding of history of 1566,

and then especially in his most famous work, which is published in French in 1576, which is his six books on the Commonwealth. Now, there Bodar came up with a theory of political authority, essentially, a juristic one, as has already been emphasized, whereby it was essential for him to make plain that authority had ultimately to have some final point of decision-making and that's the essence of sovereignty for him.

I suppose, as very briefly mentioned by Melissa, it's important to see what he saw as the four characteristics of sovereignty. It had to have especially these four traits. It had to be supreme, that's to say there could be no superior to the sovereign or would defeat the purpose. Except God. Indeed, and it was an important detail. But from a terrestrial or secular point of view, the sovereign could have no superior. Also, the sovereign was absolute, could be tried by no other tribunal.

It was also essential that sovereignty be indivisible. We can come on to, if you like, what... Tell us what you mean by that now. Well, I suppose one of the... If I mentioned the last characteristic first and then come back to that, the last characteristic is more straightforward, that sovereignty should be perpetual, it can't be changing her. at interludes that would be destabilising.

Indivisibility. Well, to understand indivisibility, it might be very useful to see how Bodard thought that the functions of sovereignty, which were essentially threefold, had to be held in one set of hands, if you like, though I should say not literally one set of hands because if you've already established, a sovereign might be an individual and monarch

or might be an assembly of the many or might be an assembly of the few. But nonetheless, the sovereign ought to at once be responsible for legislation, the making of laws, but also for the right over war and peace, and also for the appointment of senior magistrates. Now, it made no sense to Bowdoin that these functions could be partitioned amongst different bodies, because that would be a recipe for dispute,

the kind of dispute that France at the time found itself in the midst of. Well, to go on from that, thank you very much, Tim. Tim Stanton, how could Bowdoin's ideas be, applied to the France in great turmoil and religious was at the time that he was writing. So France at the beginning of the 16th century is a relatively unified and united and strong state, but by the middle of the century,

that situation has changed somewhat. The monarchy is under pressure. There's been a long and ultimately unsuccessful war with the Spanish, which has reduced its finances. and it's had to meet the rising challenge of Protestantism, which is spreading across France, perhaps a million Calvinists, and this poses a very strong challenge to the traditional idea that the good order of a state depends upon a single ruler,

a single faith and a single system of law. And so what Bowdoin is interested in is thinking through the consequences of this new situation of potential fragmentation and instability and how can we find a solution to that and the solution he proposes is sovereignty? So where did he find his basic idea of sovereignty from? He's there, the war's going all around him, let's not use the word curse, but it's disturbed and upset

and disrupted, doesn't seem to be anyone specifically in charge. So where did he say, freeze all this for a moment, and let's go to the heart of things. What is wrong here is that there's no sovereignty in this state? How did he get to that conclusion? Well, I think he got to it by reflection upon the situation in which he found himself, in which there were a variety of competing claimants,

both de facto and de jure, for authority within the state. the state is divided socially and politically between different great families in different regions who exercise high degrees of patronage. There's also different political bodies which have a kind of quasi-autonomous existence within the state, leagues, confederations, guilds and so on. And what he sees is that there needs to be, as Richard observed, a single point at which authority culminates. And from there, every subordinate body gets its meaning and purpose. So you have this single point from which everything else flows.

What did he draw on to get there? Melissa talked about the Greeks and the Romans briefly and so on. What did Bodan draw on and said, this is where we should go. What had happened in France? What did he draw on? Well, intellectually, he drew on his humanist training, his knowledge of classic text and also later juristic, texts, medieval texts, so

texts of the writers such as Bartolus of Sassoferato and Baldus, who had in various ways thought about what makes a political body a political body rather than a collection of different competing political bodies.

And what he's interested in doing is cutting through that problem by supplying what, in his view, hasn't yet been supplied even by Aristotle or Cicero. That's to say a definition. A definition that tells you what makes a political body, a single political body, rather than a seething mass of competing bodies.

The word sovereign could lead to the words kings. Was he looking back on French kings or other kings in other countries? Let's stick to France. French kings are saying that was when it worked. Well, I don't think he was quite doing that. It's not the case that he thinks that there is some golden age in French history when kings enjoyed the kind of purpose. that he's projecting through his definition of sovereignty.

It's more an analytic implication of what it is to have a commonwealth at all. If you're to have a commonwealth at all, you need this kind of power at its apex. Minister Lane, to flip across the channel, Shakespeare took up the idea whether the Dracula or indirectly is not important, really, in particular Richard the second, where the body politic and the body, natural, divine, the body natural is the man who's going to get old, get ill and die, and the body politic is a man whose state is going to continue. So the king is dead, long live the king. Makes sense in that sense. Would that an idea have been familiar to his audience?

Was he taking up an aspect of the argument of Bonham, do you think, in Richard the second? I think there are even older roots as well in English legal thoughts. So in the course of the medieval period, this idea of the king's two bodies, as you said, the body politic and the body natural had really been put to work in a number of decisions. So questions about if a young king tried to make a lease of land and then became king, was that lease of land alienating the land still valid because a king couldn't alienate by definition any part of the realm. So that idea of the King's two bodies, I think, is very much ingrained already in a tradition

of English legal thought, as well as also in the continent. So when Shakespeare, when that happened on the stage, and Richard handed over his scepter and the bowl with the oil and his own, two, bowling broke, people said,

ah, yes, we know about that. Well, they knew about it, but I think also the play really dramatizes the tensions that that doctrine raises. I mean, Harry Hensley has said sovereignty is as much a problem as a solution. And I think we really see that in Richard the second in the sense that you can say the king has two bodies. But what happens then when a person, Richard, hands over his crown. And he himself is perplexed by that. He says, now I have no name because

he isn't anymore the king. And there's a kind of paradox about is it even possible for a king to divest himself of his sovereignty. So they knew about the doctrine, but the play really dramatizes for them the tensions and it became a very political play for that reason. Richard Berg, how useful were these discussions on sovereignty to rulers and political theories think as at that time, at the time of Bowdoin, let's stick in the 16th century for the moment, or early 17th, go halfway through something like that. Okay. Well, there's no doubt that the ideas of Bodan were taken up.

And for instance, if you take the case of, if you take the case even of England, it's certainly the case that advisors of James the First were familiar with the writings of Baudat the same would apply to charge the first as well for that matter and generally speaking I think it's possible to say that

Bauda did influence a sort of attitude to administration which is often described as absolutism partly because one of his criteria for legitimate sovereignty was that it would be absolute however I think it's also important to see

that there's a sort of really a partial interpretation of what Bodar was interested in. It's crucial to recognise that for Bodar, a varieties of forms of regime would all equally have sovereignty. And the question is, you know, where would the sovereignty be located in a given regime? Exactly.

Exactly. Can we stick to, sorry to interrupt, but just to clarify it for myself, in the background of what you're saying, are they still thinking of the three possibilities, is monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Absolutely. That's it. They're largely thinking about the three possibilities or other possibilities of mixing them. However, in Europe,

aristocracies and democracies are not so prevalent regime forms. So the impact of Bodan was largely in the earlier phase, but not later, but in the earlier phase was on thinking about monarchy. But what I'm trying to suggest is that it's arguable that really this involved a distortion, that Bodan was not interested. an absolute government. He was interested in absolute sovereignty. Well, just distinguish that for us, elliptically and brilliantly, so we can go on from there. Sure.

The absolute government, not in absolute sovereign. Well, he was interested in the location of the final rights of authority, sovereignty, which might be held by various kinds of body, rather than being interested in, if you like, effective, centralized administration of a state. So it's the difference between centralized administration, if you like, and the location of a right to authority. Melissa, you want to come in. Well, one way to think about him not being interested in absolute government,

as Richard said, is the point that you made earlier, Melvin, about the role of God and indeed of natural law in this system. So for Bodan, the king or a monarch was still subject to the laws of God, to natural law, and even to the fundamental traditional customary laws of the French kingdom, say. and so that in a sense puts limits, but the point is that no one else can enforce those limits on the monarch. The first big hitter next to Boda, excuse me, the first big hitter next to Boda,

who comes into the discussion as we've scripted it really, Tim Stanton is Thomas Hobbes, in the middle of the 17th century, great English philosopher, intellectual, and what did he read Bodham on, What did he bring to the table? Well, Hobbes brought to the table a very deep sense of the precariousness of a civil condition and of the state. And in the course of his life, began an investigation into the question that really Bodan is also asking,

what is it that allows a state to exist and to subsist over time? And Hobbs comes to the conclusion that it's not at all clear that anyone, had understood or been able to provide an adequate answer to that question until he did. And of course there was the execution of Charles Lee first while he was writing, and so the king is dead, long live the king didn't work because the king was dead, and the Interregnum took over, and Cromwell, a non-king took over. Exactly. Except he did all the same stuff, but that's another matter.

Well, exactly. Hobbes says when he comes to write his great work of political theory Leviathan, and he makes clear that he's talking in the abstract about the seat of power, and not the person who occupies the seat. So the person could be Cromwell or Charles I first or indeed Charles the second. What he's interested in doing is explaining how occupancy of that seat gives life and form to a state. Unless someone occupies that seat, the state doesn't subsist. It reduces to this seething, massive competing. Patson Hobbes strikingly claims in his first major work of political theory

that all politics to his own day has been like that. There hasn't been an adequate understanding of a body politic until he writes the elements of law. Does you mean a sovereign body politic in the sense that we're talking about? Well, sovereignty is for Hobbs the essence of the Commonwealth and he means two things by that. First, that it's essential to it. So you can't have a Commonwealth unless you have sovereignty.

And secondly, he means that it's the life-giving principle for the Commonwealth. So essence is life. It's the formal cause of a Commonwealth that distinguishes it from the material out of which it's made. So if you don't have sovereignty, you can't have a Commonwealth, and that's Hobbs'

brilliant contribution to thinking about sort. I'd like to stay with Hobbes from a while because I think that was terrific, but I think it was further to go. So the king's dead, and there's no long leave the king. So that monarchical idea is, to Hobbes' great disappointment, I presume,

and so much, is not on. So he goes to what various people, Strathing, Rathans, have called the real basis of part, the people and he constructs the Leviathan, an ancient monster, a word from an ancient monster in the Old Testament. And this is, the Leviathan is what,

and what is the Leviathan stand for? Well, the Leviathan is a mortal god, as Hobbes says, and it stands both for God to its subjects and for the state to its subjects, and it is the collective embodiment of the power of the people, give an expression through a representative.

That representative is a fictional person who bears the sovereignty of all of them. So the image, the famous image in the frontist piece of Leviton, is very helpful in this connection because it shows you both a large figure looming up out of the water with a face representing this fictional person composed at the same time of lots of little people, little hermonguli, who are the source of it,

it's power. And Hobbes says elsewhere in his writings that really it's the opinion of the people that gives power to the state and nothing other than that. Minister, you want to say something. Do you mind if I ask you something first? Because I'd like to take on, because this is fascinating. But the people have to give power and they can't get it back. So they're giving their natural rights away in order to be protected and secure. Is that right? That's exactly right. And in fact, that's exactly what I wanted to say. that the transfer is, for Hobbs, the transfer is almost absolute. So the people are a disunited multitude, and as Tim was suggesting, they only obtain their unity by being embodied through the

transfer of power to a sovereign. And only if that sovereign collapses or completely becomes incapable of performing the functions of protection for which the people had transferred their power, only then does the sovereign lose power. But otherwise, their transfer is irrevocable. Yeah, the tricky bit is, how do you get the people to do that? And one of the laws saying that the people, you should do this and give all your natural rights away and let it be able? Who's going to say, does he, did he tell us how it's going to happen? Well, this is very interesting.

So Hubs has two ways of thinking about that. He says one way is that, you know, we imagine the people sort of gathering together and actually doing it. But he also has a de facto route to sovereignty, where we look at someone who, in fact, has become able. to provide protection. And people should think to themselves, I'm willing to recognize that person as my sovereign. And in the period of the interregnum, I think that's really the critical political argument. We're still in theory. How did it happen? Do you know how? Did Hobbes suggest that it should happen this way?

They should have elections. They should have representation from their show. How did he make it happen? Well, he didn't think that. He didn't think that. The two routes that he talks about don't make any difference to the character of the sovereignty that's produced. And in fact, it looks as if the, The first route, the juridical route in which people transfer rights irrevocably, is just the way of dramatising the consequences of having sovereignty. So, in fact, when Hobbes talks about what gives the sovereign power,

it's the idea that the people obey without stint, that's to say, without cessation of motion. So it's an ongoing process rather than a one-shot once and for all irrevocable laying down of right. It's a settled disposition to obey, and the question then is what settles that disposition? to obey and there Hobbs gives accounts in terms of monopolization of the pulpit by public doctrine teaching. If people don't know their duties, Hobbs says they'll never obey. It's helpful to think about some of the people Hobbs was opposing. So in the course of the English

Civil War, for example, there was the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, which claimed that it's only parliament that can embody sovereignty because in some sense parliament represents the people in the sense of being a kind of virtual depiction of the people as a whole. And Hobbs thought, no, it doesn't have to be only parliament. It can be a monarch. It can be a, so he objected to that view that there was something unique about parliament. But of course, from the other side, there were also people attacking the parliamentary doctrine saying there has to be a stronger relationship of mandation or requirement of parliament to be authorized in an ongoing way through election. So you have a kind of spectrum of views in the 17th. century. Before we move away from Hobbes and I want to come to Richard to talk about Rousseau. How did he go down? This came out. There you are. That's the solution. What did people think? It's seen as a very radical doctrine. And because of the mortal God point that Tim mentioned, it's seen by some as even a kind of heretical doctrine. So he's attacked very violently. He's seen in a way as Machiavelli had been seen previously as a kind of a threat in some ways, precisely because he's so

ecumenical as to what body can be sovereign. It could be a democracy. It could be an aristocracy. It could be a monarchy. So for many people who were invested in the thought that only kings can be legitimate or only crown in parliament can be legitimate, that was a very threatening set of ideas. He also had a rather pessimistic view of human nature and of life that life was nasty, brutish, another thing, and short. Nasty, that's right. Let's move to Russo now with Richard Burke. Russo wrote the social contract in 1762, more than 100 years after Hobbes. And he's the next big beast that comes into view for this conversation.

Who for him is the sovereign? Where does sovereignty lie for Russo? Okay, well, I think the best way of coming out that question is to explain Russo's position in the tradition of discussing sovereignty. the social contract of 1762 is often seen as being part of a longer conversation but I think it's very important to see that as well as obviously picking up on previous

disgustence of the theme Rousseau is really innovating very radical very radically with this doctrine and essentially revolutionises the concept of sovereignty in the following way previous theorists had discussed sovereignty as being taking three possible forms as we've already seen. This is not possible for

Rousseau. For Rousseau, sovereignty can only take one form and it must be democratic sovereignty. So we spoke already about the transfer of sovereignty that one gets, for instance, in Hobbes' theory of the construction of the state. There is a multitude which forms a people and then can transfer that sovereignty to, for instance, a single will. This is an invalid move, according to, to Rousseau. His fundamental goal is to try and address the question of how is it

possible for human beings to subject themselves to the rule of others without them sacrificing some fundamental part of their humanity and that fundamental part of their humanity is their freedom. And in order to preserve that, Rousseau develops the idea

of the as a word moral, the normative necessity of popular sovereignty rather than sovereignty in general. So sovereignty must reside with an assembly of the people. However, I think it's probably very important not to confuse that with full-blown democratic thinking, because whilst it's the case that you have a popular or democratic sovereign, the main business of politics on a day-to-day basis, even in Russo's state, is handled by officials, by an administration. and that administration for Russo might legitimately be monarchical or aristocratic.

In fact, it's very important to recognize that for Russo, you couldn't have a democratic government. You could have a democratic sovereignty, that's to say you could have an assembly forming to establish fundamental laws and the tenure of rulers, but not to administer the day-to-day business of politics. Where that did happen in the past in Athens, Rousseau felt that it had been an unsuccessful, fractious, prosecutorial regime.

So he's not a democratic thinker in any simple sense, a democratic theory of sovereignty, but not of popular government. These theories always break down when they have to trust the people. They don't want to, do they? Well, that's very true. They don't want to have the people in on the act. Not really.

Well, maybe they do, maybe they do, but they don't seem to. Anyway, Tim Stanton, how did his ideas play out in the French Revolution? Well, I think they played out in different ways, depending on how they were construed, but also the idea of Rousseau himself was tremendously important in the French Revolution. The noble savage, the innocent child. The exemplar of the kind of virtue that the state ought to exhibit.

So lots of people were wrestling with the problem that you just drew attention to. How do you make this work? It's one thing to say we have a democratic sovereign and this is the source of all legislative power within the state. But what does that mean in practice? and there are really two dominant ways of trying to work that out in practice. So one way of working it out which is associated really with the CES is to try to establish a representative model which does away with the worst aspects of Hobbes' theory of representation.

So you have, to begin with the idea that by a kind of natural law, people form a state, a corporate body, then that corporate body develops its own, a single general will, but then what do you do? And Cies's answer is that you need a system of representation to filter that will through various representative institutions which speak for, through their interaction, the totality of the nation. So he's arguing that popular sovereignty must mean national sovereignty,

where the nation is construed as the mass of ordinary people in the third estate as his famous pamphlet. What is the third estate? Sooner or later, we're going up to the point of what influence that these ideas have on the actions of the time, but this is good going on with the theories. Richard Burke, when looking at the relationship between sovereignty and power, America, the American Revolution is a wonderful test case.

So tell us why I think it's, or we think, you think it's a wonderful test case. Okay, that's indeed a very interesting case. And I think we should probably recognize the following first, that so far we've been talking about sovereign states. but of course the states of Europe in the 17th, particularly the 18th century were not simply states unto themselves but were empires. And so

the issue and problems surrounding sovereignty were in due course transfer to thinking about this wider domain. So in 1764 the British government of the day imposed a new regime of taxation on the Americans, the Stamp Act.

Really as a way of addressing problems with the British exchequer in the aftermath of the seven years war. However, it was soon discovered that the imposition of the Stamp Act was not successful and by 1765 the Americans were in a state of very active protest. With a change of government the following summer in July 1765, the Rocking administration, the Rockingham Wigs, decided they were going to have to deal with this problem and

recognized very soon that they were not going to be able to impose their will on the Americans. Whatever the rights of the matter, they weren't going to be able to impose their will on the Americans. And as a result, over the next six months or so, they developed a position whereby they would repeal the Stamp Act, so they would not pursue this measure of taxation, but they would at the same time promulgate a law,

a declaratory act. And that declaratory act was an assertion of British sovereignty over the colonies. And it stated that, you know, Parliament has had and does have and always will have the right to bind the colonies in statute and by law in all cases whatsoever.

That's roughly a paraphrase of the Declaratory Act. So they were asserting sovereignty whilst relinquishing power. We can't actually impose our will, but we nonetheless want to at the same time assert our right to

final authority over the empire. Now this was a very controversial declaration that was opposed by William Pitt the Elder, Lord Chatham at the time. And so there was a lively debate in British political culture about the nature of sovereignty versus its enforceability. So you might have a sovereign right, but that doesn't mean you can actually enforce it. And that was the key recognition of this period. And do you want to add anything? Or can I move on, Melissa. You're nodding away like murder. We can move on. Right,

thank you. Right, go back to Tim. Was it the idea of sovereignty, did it become accepted in European thought, let's stick to Europe as a useful tool for bringing new countries together out of the multiple states there were in Europe at the time? Well, a useful tool, certainly, but also a potentially very hazardous one for its user.

So there's a great ambivalence about sovereignty and indeed popular sovereignty, which is a legacy of the French Revolution. The French Revolution doesn't end especially well. And so there's a great fear, actually, of popular sovereignty and by the same token some fear that the obvious alternative to that system of

representation leads in a more or less direct line to Napoleon and Bonapartism and the representation of the nation by a single dominant figure and so throughout the 19th century really there's an attempt to navigate between those two poles while at the same time accepting that Rousseau in a sense has triumphed. democratic sovereignty looks now to be the only legitimate form of sovereignty you can have. The question is how can you have it in a framework

which is still redolent of the different forms of government that have been established in the classical writer. So you still have monarchies, you still have aristocracies, you still have democracies, as forms of government. But the underlying sovereignty, now it's accepted, has to be really democratic sovereignty.

Like the tide coming in, but how far is it coming in? Who's on that tide? It's a long fight, isn't it? Yes, and I think this problem about the relationship between representative government and democratic sovereignty really is at the heart of then the political struggles in the wake of the American and French revolutions going forward and really remains in some ways a theoretically unsettled question in some sense. How is it that the people can, in some sense, lend their sovereignty and have it be exercised in a meaningful way by a form of a form of. representative government and yet in some sense also retain it. So in the American Revolution, for example, we see actually the very first popular referendum, as our colleague Richard Tuck has pointed out, ever in the world, was in Massachusetts in 1778 where it was an attempt

to ratify a state constitution. And we see there for the first time the thought that there's some role for a popular vote in relation to the fundamentals of a constitution. Is theory exercising authority and power in the discussions, or could you say, look, what's really happening is it sates are clashing because of power grabs, because of economic circumstances, and so on and so forth? We're talking about great political theories, both, and that's what this program is based on. Is theory coming into arguments which really matter, coming into events that really matter? I think a great example where we really see that happening is Thomas Payne and the pamphlet Common Sense in 1775, which almost single-handedly actually rules out the sort of popular acceptability of a monarch as sovereign in America, really through ridicule.

So he ridicules the idea that monarchs can, given that they might be senile or fatuous or in other ways kind of inadequate to the task, why would you want a monarch exercising your sovereignty? And really kind of single-handedly, that changes the thinking and practice of the American Revolution. Would you go along with that, Richard? Yes, I'd go along also with the general point, really, that what we have is an attempt by sets of arguments

to really understand the conditions under which they are living and we find that, you know, one ends up with dispute over these various options for the understanding of sovereignty. So rather than being an item which maintains its stability and durability throughout the 700 years that we're discussing, rather we're talking about a sequence of disputes over contentious and vying interpretations of the nature of political power. And I think Richard is absolutely right. that comes out very clearly in the ratification debates in America after the constitution is proposed because, of course, those debates are, I soaked in theory, theoretical reflection about the nature of sovereignty, how you can combine the sovereignty of states with a confederation

or indeed a united states, a unity of states. And lots of people are very worried about the threat of being impaled on the horns of a Hobbesian dilemma. Either you have a confederation, in which case you don't have a single unitary body at all, or you do have a united body, in which case the sovereignty of the states disappears. And so theory is playing a very important role, not just in explaining the issue, but also in legitimation,

in trying to legitimate whatever settlement comes out of the discussions. To come back to where we started from, or where we nearly started from, it seemed to me that Bodan set people impossible goals. Sovereignty had to be supreme, absolute, indivisible and perpetual. It's a hard act, isn't it? I think that's a really important point, because there's a sense in which Bodan thought he was a claim to be giving a definition, but in a way he's actually

setting out a very high and strong, specific theory about sovereignty. And I don't think that we necessarily have to agree with that theory. In fact, insofar as it seemed to rule out the possibility of mixed constitutions, mixed regimes, I think history actually in some way can be thought to refute it that we actually do see in some sense, even if we can imagine popular sovereignty as united and indivisible, in fact, it has to always be manifested and operated through some channel in which it appears divisible. So that paradox, I think, does mean we can't just accept Bodan at his word.

Finally, Richard, Richard Burke. Yes, and coming back to Bodan, again, it's worth bearing in mind that he was a lawyer, and therefore his theory of sovereignty was during, But, of course, a juridical conception of authority is not necessarily adequate to capturing all aspects of political power. So you might have supreme legislation, but nonetheless be able to control very little. And that in a way was the lesson of the American Revolution. So sovereignty does not mean controlling your destiny.

Well, thank you all very much indeed. Melissa Lane, Richard Burke and Tim Stanton. Next week we'll be talking about the invention of photography and its impact on the 19th century. very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Well, we didn't get into the 20th century, really. Deliberately, no, exactly. Today being the day it is, it is deliberate. No, no. But, I mean, even without going to current affairs, I think what we could say is that one of the debates we've seen around the UN, for example, is the question, you know, do sovereign states have the right

to do anything they choose within their boundaries if they're recognized as. sovereign externally by their fellow states. And there's been a real kind of struggle at the level of the UN to say, no, actually, states have a responsibility to protect their citizens. There is some kind of internal standard. They have to be. Whether you have the rights are going to Yugoslavia or interfere in Sierra Leone or so, yes. There's certainly more to be said about the French Revolution. After all, the declaration of the rights of man and citizen was very much asserting in one of its articles that sovereignty essentially resides in the nation. And the working out of the implications of that statement, you know, embodies a lot of subsequent history, if you like. So I think it's

probably right to say that some really epochal events cast a long shadow over debates about sovereignty. And we did touch upon them, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. We didn't mention the English Revolution, Adela. No. Because I suppose Hobbes have given us enough of England. Do you think he had to? I think he did. I mean, we didn't really get into some of the details of his objections to the parliamentary case for sovereignty,

which are very interesting, because of course he thinks that they're learning very bad lessons from their classical predecessors and trying to chop the kingdom into small pieces, really. And so the question for him is about who, bears sovereignty and why it has to be born only in one place. And I think, I mean, one question we didn't get onto what,

but perhaps could have done is, is whether that kind of personal predication is always necessary. So, sovereignty is something that can be ascribed to a system of law, let's say, rather than to a person, whether that person's a natural person with a head and two arms or a

fictional corporate person like a state. Can you speak of a sovereignty of law? And that debate becomes very, heated and important during the days of the Weimar Republic in Germany where lots of words, ink and eventually blood is spilt trying to work out the answer to that question. One thing is about Hobbes, I think, that he had an impact, his radicalism, I think was his tone that put people off as,

this nasty root. People didn't want to think life was like that, did they? Yes, I think, actually, I mean, it's a very good point. That's to say, you know, 20th century commentary associates Hobbes with absolutism and therefore some sort of retrograde moment in history whereas I think it's very important to recognise that he was precisely

a radical thinker beginning. I mean let's look at the arguments that no longer seem to have much valence after Hobbes first of all the theocracy that's to say that authority derived straightforwardly from gods and that would be interpreted by you know

priestcraft and equally patriarchalism that you know the Sons of Adam by right rule. You know, by the 18th century, these are not viable. You know, they're basically on the way out of systems of argument and rising in their place as some kind of neo-Hobbsian doctrine of popular sovereignty. The crucial thing is that this was then subject

to disputation's interpretation. It's not as though there was then a sort of template which people could interpret. They struggled over the meaning of the implications of that contribution to the debate. I mean, I think it's also very important that one of the most important legacies of Hobbs is the idea that representation in a sense is the first idea and democracy needs to be

understood through it rather than having democracy as the kind of dominant idea and then representation as attempt to make democracy work in practice. I mean, there's a sense in which you can interpret Hobbs as moving in that direction through the three great works of political theory that he is responsible for. So by Leviathan, you don't have the sense that you begin with a kind of popular sovereignty, democratic sovereignty, and then that's handed over to someone to represent. The whole idea of having a people in the first place is tied to the notion of a representative.

If you don't have a representative, you don't have a people. So there can't be a popular sovereignty that precedes representation. Just a separate point, actually, that I think if we're talking about the things that we didn't discuss, that would have been very useful to discuss, or certainly, or bear strongly upon this topic. is, of course, the dissolution of European empires in the 20th century all conducted in the name of popular sovereignty.

So the Habsburg, monarchy, the British Empire, so on so forth. These release into the world, you know, many micro-popular sovereignties. And that, as a word, if you like, secessionist pressure brought about by popular sovereignty is something we still live with. Thank you very much. We've got a producer coming in, Simon, with the announcement, something you can't resist. There are more than 700 programs to download and listen to for free from the In Our Time website.

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