“The Majesty of the People” may sound like an honorific phrase to most modern democratic ears, but it was not so in 1790s Britain, when it was as hotly contested as celebrated. Georgina Green's brilliant, demanding, but rewarding book explores these ambiguities in the writings of six authors central to any authoritative account of that volatile decade: Thomas Paine, John Thelwall, William Godwin, Helen Maria Williams, Samuel Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. Throughout, her analyses are centered on the instability of her title phrase, even in its more neutral form, popular sovereignty. The crux of the problem is, when does “people power” become tyrannical?

For extreme enthusiasts, like Robespierre and Marat, the answer was, never. The will of the people equals Truth. For radicals like the publisher Daniel Isaac Eaton, or radical fellow travelers like the then Duke of Norfolk, toasting “the majesty of the People” was a cheekily au courant propaganda gesture. But for the British establishment, the idea was a nightmare, and any words used publicly to celebrate it might be—and often were—charged as treasonous. (There were more trials for treason and sedition in the 1790s than in any decade before or after in British history.)

The right of a people to rebel against unjust, tyrannical rulers was a staple of political theory dating back to classical times. The problem was, when? Or, who decided that a king had become tyrannical enough to be deposed, or at least resisted? The bulk of Green's book is taken up with close rhetorical analyses of texts by its six central authors as to how the power of popular sovereignty could be imagined or represented without falling foul of its own benignly assumed powers.

The key technical terms for Green's analysis are constituent and the constituted powers. The latter is the form of law(s) that the former draws up to govern itself but that can never be represented or enacted in and of itself. Thus, no bill of rights could include an article saying that the right of the people to rebel against their rulers cannot be abridged—because, if it were part of a written constitution, that article would be invoked as a right of resistance every time push came to shove, which happens all the time.

This paradox, that the right of freedom cannot be encapsulated in any laws of a free people, is the one that each of Green's six authors wrestled with, with necessarily mixed success, given the incommensurability of the two concepts, right and law. Her discussion of the arguments at the trial of Louis XVI is exemplary here. Paine could argue humanely for the king's rights as a man, even a guilty one. But Robespierre could argue much more efficiently for the king's having no rights at all. As a convicted enemy of the people he had no civil status whatsoever; he was already as good as dead, a fact that his execution would only—salutarily—make manifest.

Paine, against Marat's argument that any system of representation is necessarily imperfect and therefore unjust, was continually “revising the nature of the nation” between what we may call essential and existential concepts of the people, as “part of an ethical strategy which diffuses tyrannical authority via an insistence on the contingencies and misrepresentations of language” (82). Such exploitations of linguistic contingency are central to Green's defense of all her writers' versions of popular sovereignty. In each of them, she picks up on some apparently trivial detail and elaborates it deconstructively into a heuristic device that opens out into her larger thesis. In Paine's case, it is the fact that his speeches to the National Convention had to be translated into French and read aloud by someone else. From this, “translation” becomes the central trope for Green's representation of Paine's efforts to speak and defend “the language of liberty and humanity” (that is, politics and morality). Sometimes this rhetorical strategy of Green's is more ingenious than persuasive, but it is consistent, and theoretically sophisticated. Contemporary theorists like Hannah Arendt, Pierre Bourdieu, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri figure recurrently in Green's discussion, updating its relevance to modern times.

In the second part of the book, the democratic power of the people comes up against “the sovereignty of justice.” Each of the writers covered here—Paine, Williams, and Godwin—devise or stumble upon discursive writing practices that enable them to preserve an ethical or moral dimension in political situations that threaten—such is pressure of revolutionary times—to deliver “correct” answers or actions that are shocking to conventional morality. Green's chapter on Helen Maria Williams is to my mind the best in the book. It has the advantage of dealing with a single, though immense, text: the eight volumes of Letters from France Williams published between 1791 and 1801. Green traces the stages of Williams' identification with the (French) people, from her transparent emotionalism of 1790 to the hard-earned realism of the end of the decade, a practice of writing which becomes increasingly adept at avoiding reductive binaries. From naively identifying with the people (“I am the People, Myself”) to finding her way through “The Disintegrating Mass” to a recognition of “The Tyranny of Narrating the People,” Williams's Letters from France in Green's reading have a rhetorical coherence and theoretical substance that represent a high point among recent recuperations of Williams's reputation. In Green's view, Williams develops an appreciation of the tyrannic power latent in art itself, as she critiques the role of the Revolution's greatest painter, Jacques Louis David, in orchestrating Robespierre's Festival of the Supreme Being. Rejecting the clarity (that is, tyranny) of such manifestations, Williams is willing to surrender “artistic power over the world with an historicizing impulse; happily undermining the absolutism of that artistic power” (107). This conclusion is paradigmatic for each of Green's writerly heroes' tentative, trial-and-error negotiations away from the absolutist threat lurking at the heart of the notion of “the majesty of the people,” discursive rhetorical negotiations that exemplify for her the role of the writer in the 1790s.