Popular sovereignty has been at the foundation of our idea of political legitimacy since the late seventeenth century. Kevin Olson offers us an admirable genealogy of this concept. His focus is on understanding how the West came to conceive of that collectivity called “the people”; how it acquired its particular normative significance; and how the resulting construction became “unproblematically foundational” (p. 9). Olson aims to “destabilize the natural rectitude of the people” by showing how this idea and its “normatization” were, and still are, far more problematic and contestable than we usually think (pp. 100–105, 169).
Like Benedict Anderson’s analysis in Imagined Communities (1992) of how national communities are brought to life, Olson investigates how “the people” is constituted, but unlike Anderson, Olson wants to better expose how this shared feeling of commonality gains its sense of being normatively compelling through the social interplay of “word, image and practice” (p. 41). Much of Imagined Sovereignties is taken up with historical analysis of eighteenth-century France and Haiti. While the former focus is hardly surprising, the latter is somewhat unexpected, and that is part of Olson’s purpose: to show how the relatively familiar, modern French revolutionary idea of the people functioned when it traveled to the relatively unfamiliar terrain of what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where the inhabitants revolted “against the French on their own terms” (p. 109).
The chapter on France insightfully traces the slow and contentious emergence of popular sovereignty. Olson attends to the multiple and contested terrains of pamphlets, crowds, festivals, and debates in which claims about “the people” took on multiple shapes. Even more fascinating are the chapters on Haiti. There, in the context of colonialism and slavery, one sees vividly how difficult it was to imagine an unproblematic picture of revolutionary, popular politics. The difficulty confronting any simple conceptualization of a unified people can be seen in three competing ways in which that entity was imagined by different groups.
One faction saw the revolutionary people as the white planter class that wanted to separate from France, leaving slavery intact in a new, independent country. A second imagined a more egalitarian, property-owning, racism-free people, who nevertheless would perpetuate the institution of property in slaves and remain within the French empire. Finally, Olson sketches an “agrarian-anti-slavery imaginary” (p. 124). He admits that his portrait is somewhat speculative, given that this movement emerged mostly from decentralized practices about which there is little written record. This group did not have a formal plan to end slavery, but rather sought a renegotiation of the work lives of slaves, as a result of which the individuals who made up this “people” would have three days free per week for themselves to develop their own agricultural initiatives and create “counterplantations,” allowing for “agrarian subsistence and market independence” (pp. 126–27).
Even after the Haitian revolution succeeded and a formal sense of the people had to be installed in official documents, additional unorthodox ideas emerged. In the American and French constitutions, the people was understood to include humans in an abstract sense, but with the tacit understanding that this really meant white males. In the language of Haiti’s 1805 constitution, such standardized deception was implicitly highlighted and then symbolically reversed (at least in racial, if not gender, terms) with the claim that all distinctions of color would end and that all Haitians would “‘henceforth be known under the generic denomination of black’” (p. 155). A further, remarkable construction of the people appeared in the 1843 constitution’s idea of a postcolonial, transnational citizenry; in effect, “all Africans and Indians are Haitian” (p. 160).
In his analysis of France and Haiti, Olson marvelously elucidates how contested and unstable were the characterizations of this emerging eighteenth-century people. But his genealogy devotes comparatively little attention to how and why this idea later evolved into what he calls a “folk foundationalism” in the sense of acquiring an unquestioned, unitary status in modern political life (pp. 7–9). I found myself expecting a chapter showing in detail the character of this later process by which imaginaries congeal and become naturalized and seemingly inevitable, their contestability forgotten. Clearly, such a process often involves collusion with structures of domination and the agendas of elites. Thus, Michel Foucault’s genealogy in Discipline and Punish (1977) ties the modern compulsion toward “discipline” to the political and economic “take-off” of industrial capitalism. Accordingly, Foucault refers to the growing organization of the factory floor, as well as control, production, and greater management of workers who fit together “naturally” at this emerging site of discipline. Olson’s potential story about the causes of the comparable naturalization of a field of social meaning around “the people” would likely be more difficult to tell primarily as a tale of growing power and domination. In raising this issue, my point is not to imply that I know how this story should be told, but simply to emphasize how challenging it would be to narrate a convincing one.
I will come back to this issue. But first there is another critical matter to highlight. If we focus on the United States, a question arises regarding the author’s starting point. Does he overemphasize the normative force of “the power of the people”? In the United States, there has been, from the start, a strong and resilient strain of skepticism about popular power and democracy. The ideas of limiting this power and affirming individual, God-given natural rights have arguably been as central to our political tradition as the idea of the power of the people. In this regard, I was struck by Olson’s unqualified assertion that today, “natural rights and self-evident truths . . . have been thoroughly discredited” (pp. 5–6). While this might be correct for contemporary intellectuals, the claim seems questionable as a characterization of the general population, or popular political discourse and the public policy that emerges from it at both the local and national levels.
At the start of each semester, I conduct a survey of my undergraduates to get some sense of their political values and opinions. In 2018, 87% said that they affirm the idea of “God-given natural rights.” Lest you think this simply reflects a highly conservative, southern student body, it is significant that 81% identified themselves as liberal or moderate, and only 16% as conservative. Now, like Olson, I do not find much intellectual cogency in the idea of natural rights, and I spend a good deal of class time trying to deflate it. But my point in the present context is that perhaps this idea retains as much force as a folk foundationalism in the American context as “the power of the people.”
This needs to be acknowledged if one is going to make sense of important political phenomena today. In referring to contemporary popular politics, Olson speaks of various exemplary movements, including the Tea Party (pp. 1, 169, 178). I would argue that this group clearly manifests a good degree of skepticism about the power of the people as the core notion of American political culture. Of course, Tea Partyers do appeal to some sense of popular politics, but they tend to focus on what the majority of “real Americans” want. Olson’s framework can encompass this phenomenon to a degree, with his claim that “the people” has always involved a plurality of imagined sovereignties. But he would nevertheless not be able to give a convincing account of the Tea Party and many other Trump supporters, after having so strongly dismissed ideas of natural, God-given rights to individual freedoms that such political actors feel are threatened by too much democracy.
One of the best aspects of Imagined Sovereignties is the deeply intelligent, concluding discussion of the role that genealogies of core concepts like the people should play in political theory. Genealogies are of course generally intended to slacken our drive to imagine our basic normative concepts as pure rational artifacts of enlightened modernity. But why do we continually manifest such a drive? In his concluding chapter, Olson argues that it is because such concepts are not just rationally normative, but also “existential,” in that they help to constitute our identity, “spark our imagination, quicken the heart, and move people to act” (pp. 170–72). Stable, unproblematic ideas, like the people, help us feel secure and edified as we engage in political action. Earlier, I criticized him for not better tracking the history of how the people became naturalized. Although he could have done more here in terms of historical analysis, I nevertheless think that he locates, with his focus on the existential, what would have to be one of the central insights animating any convincing narrative.
When genealogical critique loosens the unreflective “existential force of deeply seated imaginaries,” it potentially frees us “to think otherwise” by providing some distance from naturalized concepts of Western modernity (p. 173). But this shift, Olson thoughtfully reminds us, does not constitute an immaculate emancipation of our imagination. Rather, at best it means that we start a slow, piecemeal process, informed by careful historical investigation, through which we gain distance from the shibboleths of our political traditions, but also realize simultaneously that “Enlightenment concepts and practices” may themselves continue to “provide a basis for creative imagination” (p. 150).
