I am very grateful for Stephen White’s subtle and sympathetic comments. He asks for a more detailed account of how ideas of popular sovereignty lose their problematic character and become naturalized. This is an astute request that I very much embrace.
In Chapter 5 of Imagined Sovereignties, I sketch part of that story, claiming that it traces an arc through processes of problematization, habituation, and forgetting. There, I note that a more detailed genealogy would follow the transmutation of popular power through the waves of liberation that took place around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (p. 106). These stories typically reflect a need to arrive at some workable notion of sovereignty that is not rooted in monarchy. Some are driven by elite interests, as White suggests, while others show a much broader array of agendas and conceptual sources. In all such cases, I would expect ideas of popular sovereignty to be naturalized through various forms of repetition, rearticulation, institutionalization, and association with the aura of other ideas and events. This history would never be a linear one, of course. As ideas of popular sovereignty are taken up in new contexts, they are inevitably reproblematized in novel ways. The great anticolonial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries undoubtedly have many interesting stories to tell in this regard.
White also notes the persistence of natural-rights thinking in contemporary cultures, presenting it as a phenomenon that might confound my genealogy of popular sovereignty. This actually illustrates a number of the points I am trying to make, however. Natural rights have been on the ropes as an intellectual agenda at least since Jeremy Bentham’s Anarchical Fallacies in 1796. They remain an active belief among a significant portion of the population, however—a prime example of what I call folk foundationalism. It is interesting to ask why such thinking has flourished in some circles rather than disappearing.
Popular sovereignty has had a contingent and changing relationship with natural rights over the centuries. At times it has been based on them, at other times it has competed with them, and sometimes the two have subsisted in uneasy tension with each other. Further, the two themes have evolved differently within various communities of thought and practice, resulting in radically different political imaginaries that are often hostile to one another. In the Haitian and French materials that I examine, “the rights of man” are often invoked to support different and conflicting sovereign imaginaries, always in a vague, auratic sense. Today’s evocations of natural rights seem similarly conflicted and penumbral.
Tracing these intertwined histories could reveal further dimensions of the phenomena I am interested in: the messiness of our beliefs; the odd processes that naturalize them; the existential force of such ideas; the differentiation of communities of thought and practice; our ability to embrace ideas that are in tension (or even contradiction) with one another; the unnoticed persistence of past imaginaries; and their permutation into new forms. These genealogies have many interesting stories left to tell.
