This chapter describes the connection between state constitutions and the essential aims of regulatory governance in the American states, providing an overview of state constitutionalism and of the elements of state constitutional history as it relates to governmental structure and purpose. The basic theme of the chapter is that to understand the police power requires a fundamental understanding of the objectives of state constitutionalism. At a high level, state constitutions look to distribute effectively political power and balance democracy with the protection of individual rights. Even as fundamentally political documents, they are designed to succeed (although they occasionally fail). Likewise, the powers assigned to institutions of government are intended to facilitate constitutional success.

How has discrimination changed over time? What does discrimination look like today? This chapter begins by highlighting severe and systematic acts of discrimination throughout American history. It then assesses contemporary discrimination through a range of audit studies and other methods and then delves into individual perceptions of discrimination.

Chapter 3 provides a review of democratic theory, moving from the “minimal conception” of democratic politics to democracy in its representative, constitutional, participatory, deliberative, and epistemic forms. The chapter offers a comparison of where America stands today among the world’s democracies and introduces the question of whether democracy carries the assumption of equality; it also reviews data on inequality throughout American history and on the more recent increase in inequality. We propose the idea that inequality is not extraneous to our democratic politics, but a direct result of it.

The Introduction presents the main questions and aims of the book. I argue that Roman thinkers used the metaphor of the body politic to articulate competing visions of the res publica between the Catilinarian Conspiracy and Year of the Four Emperors. I frame my discussion in relation to the Cambridge School of intellectual history, which has catalyzed the revival of interest in classical republicanism. In contrast to its focus on questions of liberty and popular sovereignty, my book turns towards problems of statesmanship and constitutional transformation. It asks how a foundational metaphor of civic organization evolved in response to the establishment of autocracy. It foregrounds the importance of metaphor as an avenue of political thought.

Chapter 4 focuses on democracy, specifically the creation of a violent American political process. By the 1840s, the right to vote expanded to include nearly all White men in the United States. The establishment of this racialized and gendered space put the nation at the global forefront of White male political participation. These voters elected militant candidates, used violence to set boundaries around the electorate, and physically intimidated political opponents. They demonstrated the import of Whiteness and violence to democratic development. The chapter covers Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the election of 1828, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, and Bleeding Kansas.

Around the world today, right-wing authoritarian movements labeled populist claim to be vehicles of popular sovereignty. Analysts have debated the definition of populism and the economic and cultural sources of these movements. Few have closely analyzed the “stories of peoplehood” advanced by authoritarian populist movements, or explored how they can be countered by more inclusive and egalitarian stories of peoplehood. This chapter suggests criteria for developing better stories of peoplehood, using the example of American stories that might compete effectively with the Trump movement’s narrative of “making America great again.”

In both France and the United States, the ascendance in the late 1780s and early 1790s of a version of constitutional popular sovereignty oriented around disembodied representation laid the foundation for the abrupt invention of an alternative, absolutist understanding of “the people’s” authority in 1792-1793. Known as democracy, that absolutist conception simultaneously energized and destabilized each polity by demanding embodied, iconic formulations of “the people.” The resultant political muddle in the second half of the 1790s partially obscured institutional innovations critical to the turn-of-the-century reconciliation of disembodied representation and democratic absolutism. With Napoleon’s rise to power and the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, democratic absolutism flourished. The analogous relationship between developments in France and the United States in the 1790s and early nineteenth century stemmed in part from the diffusionary dynamics of the French Revolution. Diffusionary forces would not have registered so powerfully, however, if residents of the United States had not been prepared for them by their prior investment in monarchy. Developments in the early American republic tracked closely to successive French revolutionary phases because absolutist principles, habits, and hopes continued to animate large numbers of people long after the adoption of the Constitution.

The 2016 and 2020 elections in the United States have raised questions about the stability of cultures, practices, and institutions that sustain principles of popular sovereignty. Long-running concerns in the United States about voters’ capacity for deliberation and judgment have urgently come to the fore. What does this mean for college students, many of whom are coming of age politically as newly enfranchised participants in democratic life? This chapter reports the results of a course that brought together first-year college students at two different colleges – one a large, southern public university and another a small, liberal arts college in the northeast. The course was designed to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about democracy by triangulating democratic theory, social scientific research, and the students’ own on-the-ground investigations, and to prompt student reflection on their democratic participatory lives in a moment of deep popular unrest and elite cynicism about the prospects for self-governance. We document and examine the course, emphasizing connections between the pedagogy and principles under discussion.

Thomas Hobbes’ affinity for certain core conceptions of liberalism has been noted by critics and admirers alike. Nonetheless, these proto-liberal aspects have tended to be overshadowed by his more obvious institutional support for absolute monarchy. This tension has sparked generations of disagreement. While building on familiar scholarly debates, the chapter sheds light on three less explored Hobbesian conceptual revolutions. The first is Hobbes’ distinction between persons and individuals. The ascendancy of the individual at the expense of the personage gives rise to a second building block of modern conceptions of popular sovereignty: namely, the reign of quantity and the depreciation of quality. Assuming an underlying identity among such individuals, popular sovereignty is predicated on an ability to measure their respective wills quantitatively. Finally, the Hobbesian theory model of solidarity is distinguished by its aspiration to uniformity. What Hobbes castigates as asperity on the part of individual subjects must be resisted not only because the existence of discrepant wills challenges uniformity, but also because such persons are representative of differences.

Sovereignty is obviously key in the Brexit context, and in many ways lies at the core of this book’s argument – a main part of which is that Britain has never been able to justify its assertion of unlimited parliamentary sovereignty. This book endorses the view that the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty no longer carries the weight that Dicey accorded it, nor should it. Indeed Dicey was himself inconsistent, and, in his energetic opposition to Irish Home Rule, was prepared to depart from the application of parliamentary sovereignty. And in any case, Dicey’s theory is not watertight historically, and Westminster sovereignty is also territorially challenged. However, it might be argued that EU membership posed the greatest challenge to UK parliamentary sovereignty. However, Britain never lost its external sovereignty (i.e. what is frequently described as ‘national’ sovereignty, whereby a country is sovereign and recognized as independent by the international community) as Britain voluntarily joined the EEC, and also voluntarily exited, with Brexit. But Parliament did constrain its own sovereignty through the ECA 1972, and although that Act has now been repealed by Brexit, there is no reason why Parliament should not place further constraints on its own sovereignty in future.

The end of the twentieth century was once seen as the ultimate triumph of liberal, constitutional democracy, as new waves of democratization swept the world and as nation-states pursued bold plans of economic and institutional integration. By the third decade of the twenty-first century, however, constitutional democracies, liberal values, and global economic integration were under threat from a rising tide of populist authoritarianism. The distance between these two moments is not so great. In fact, their seemingly divergent moods and tendencies are best understood as distinct manifestations of common tensions that are fundamental to the idea of a sovereign and self-governing people. This introductory chapter argues that the resonance and endurance of popular sovereignty rest on its ambivalences and tensions, its contested status, and even its inherently fictional character. It demonstrates the value of revitalizing the study of popular sovereignty, conceived not as an ideological conviction or a rhetorical device but as a field of enduring questions through which seemingly disparate political phenomena can be understood.

With the conclusion of the First World War the ages of global empires comes to an end and hitherto familiar and trusted ways of governing come to an end. Empires shatter, Kingdoms tumble. The interbellum is the age of mass mobilization of peoples in a host of new states. New political systems come to the fore (socialist, communist and fascist regimes), new concepts (universal suffrage, equal representation, corporatism, etcetera) claim their place in new liberal democracies that pop up throughout the world. New constitutions of a sixth generation - the Leviathan constitutions - enshrine the arrangements needed for these forms of mass mobilization.

The end of the nineteenth century heralds in the age of nationalism, national unification (e.g. Italy and Germany), colonialism and globalization. A fifth generation of imperial constitutions accommodate this by pooling government power through mass-political organization, an increase in parliamentary competence and party-political organisation, thus increasing inclusivity. Throughout Europe, as Chris Thornhill writes, the imperial period brought both an extension of national franchises and a correlated consolidation of domestic statehood

At the end of the eighteenth century a wave of revolutionary constitutions engulfs Western Europe and America. Most of these mark a new start and express the tenets of Enlightenment: rule of law, division of power, fundamental rights and the concept of conditional government power ( social contract).

This chapter introduces the main claims of Democracy and Empire, which reconceptualizes imperial popular sovereignty and self-determination as imperial concepts and constructs. This requires tracing the racial capitalist logics that marked the historical emergence of claims of popular sovereignty in western polities and their reliance on imperial forms of capitalist accumulation and explicating the political ramifications of these material underpinnings. The introduction explains how the book goes beyond existing accounts of white democracy by theorizing the material and ecological components of this form of rule and conceptualizing it as a properly transnational imperial form. Vis-à-vis the literature on popular sovereignty, the book makes the case that popular sovereignty and self-determination depended on popular claims that demanded collective access to wealth obtained by imperial means and required the exploitation of nonwhite subjects. Finally, the Introduction explains how the framework of racial capitalism informs Democracy and Empire’s project and presents its contribution within this approach, to assess the interconnections between different forms of racial subjection, and to theorize migration and nature within racial capitalism. In closing, this section provides a summary of the substantive chapters of the book.

Even before the century had ended, battle was commenced over how its momentous events would be remembered. During the years 1698–1700 a series of Roundhead memoirs and treatises – the ‘Whig canon’ – were printed. They were devoted to ‘attacking the maintenance of standing armies by the state, inveighing against priestcraft, and asserting the primacy of the ancient constitution’.1 The publisher responsible for the project was John Danby, working closely with the radical intellectual John Toland. For Danby and Toland, these works demonstrated that the revolutionary events of the century had been validated by and were a vindication of England’s ancient constitution (which now needed protection against the encroachments of William III). Fire was quickly returned by the Tory press, which began publishing Royalist memoirs and the like. It was in the midst of this that the first publication of Clarendon’s great History of the Rebellion commenced, with the first volume appearing in 1702. Clarendon’s son, Laurence Hyde, commended his father’s role ‘in preserving the constitution of our government entire’. English government repudiated political violence: ‘the nature of our excellent government hath provided, in the constitution of it, other remedies, in a Parliamentary way’ to preserve the Crown’s prerogative and the liberties of the people. In particular – and this was a topical subject given the rise of politics out of doors in the later Stuart period – the Whig habit of ‘appealing to the people out of Parliament as it were to a fourth estate of the realm’ was shown to be ‘just another way of undermining the ancient and true constitution’.2

Chapter 5 examines debates around the drafting of India’s independent constitution between 1946 and 1950. It focuses on a group of socialist thinkers who criticized the nationalist commitment to parliamentary government.