'Can popular sovereignty be more than an ideology we impose on the people we call our fellow citizens - and the past? The essays in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner's collection all address this question. Some of the authors consider it soluble. They think that a people can be supreme, even though only a few ever rule …' Ben Slingo, The Times Literary Supplement
Introduction Richard Bourke; 1. Athenian democracy and popular tyranny Kinch Hoekstra; 2. Popular sovereignty as control of officeholders: Aristotle on Greek democracy Melissa Lane; 3. Popular sovereignty in the late Roman republic: Cicero and the will of the people Valentina Arena; 4. Popolo and law: late medieval sovereignty in Marsilius and the jurists Serena Ferente; 5. Democratic sovereignty and democratic government: the sleeping sovereign Richard Tuck; 6. Parliamentary sovereignty, popular sovereignty, and Henry Parker's adjudicative standpoint Alan Cromartie; 7. Popular sovereignty and representation in the English Civil War Lorenzo Sabbadini; 8. Prerogative, popular sovereignty, and the American founding Eric Nelson; 9. Popular sovereignty and political representation: Edmund Burke in the context of eighteenth-century thought Richard Bourke; 10. From popular sovereignty to civil society in post-revolutionary France Bryan Garsten; 11. Popular sovereignty as state theory in the nineteenth century Duncan Kelly; 12. Popular sovereignty and anticolonialism Karuna Mantena; 13. Popular sovereignty in an age of mass democracy: politics, parliament, and parties in Weber, Kelsen, Schmitt and beyond Timothy Stanton; Bibliography; Index.