Contemporary political theorists tend to understand popular assembly in terms of embodiment in the present, part of an effort to temper linguistic determinism in prevailing theories of collective action. These accounts go too far. Instead, symbolic acts of memorialization may facilitate collective identity in the present. This technique emphasizes narrative recitation and judgment in a manner that may foster both disruption and preservation. Thus, the unfolding of mass demonstrations in late 1970s Iran accorded with descriptions of a collective subject in the image of Zaynab bint Ali. This feature of Iranian history recalls and departs from theories of popular assembly as self-witnessing, also described in scholarly debates as collective self-regard.

The second decade of the twenty-first century saw emergent social movements challenge the authority of the Islamic Republic. The pattern prompted competing notions of revolution in public debates about Iranian politics. This introductory chapter posits questions regarding the subject of revolution in the debates. It identifies a shared rhetorical pattern between competing parties, who, despite their differences, construe revolutionaries as partisans. The chapter proposes an inquiry into the 1979 revolution, recovering an unexamined archetype of collective action to reframe polemics. The archetype of an insurgent witness describes the millions of people who joined mass demonstrations from December 1978 until the fall of the Pahlavi state on February 11, 1979, as both partisans and spectators. The idea departs from prevalent templates in social science studies of revolution, political theories of agency in revolutionary contexts, and extant studies of modern Iran. To see it more clearly, we may consider a perspectival comparison with Taziyeh mourning processions, in conversation with Ali Shariati’s insurrectionary speeches about the Karbala paradigm.

This chapter argues that the second core justification for traditionalism concerns the mechanisms through which the American people become bound to their Constitution and the civic affection necessary to sustain the American democratic republic. This emotional side of the Constitution has been largely ignored by constitutional theorists, but it is critical to sustaining it. Traditions give the people a sense of agency and ownership over their foundational charter of governance. Related justifications for traditionalism include its capacity to foster democratic self-governance and its cultivation of a healthy populism in Americans’ regard for their Constitution.

This chapter examines the compound republic established by the U.S. Constitution, emphasizing its innovative balance of national and state powers. Unlike the Articles of Confederation’s league of states, the Constitution was ratified by the people, not state legislatures, and thereby creates a national government with direct authority over individuals, but only within its assigned sphere. This “new science of politics,” as Hamilton termed it, departs from Montesquieu’s view that republics suit only small territories, enabling a robust union capable of addressing external threats and internal defects such as the ineffective taxation and defense under the Articles. Madison’s writings in The Federalist highlight the Constitution’s blend of national and federal elements, ensuring legitimacy through popular sovereignty while preserving state autonomy in areas outside the enumerated powers. The chapter explores the Webster-Hayne Debate and Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s tariff nullification to refute secession and nullification and reaffirm the Constitution’s supremacy, while acknowledging states’ roles in “interposition,” as in the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, to alert citizens to potential federal overreach.

This chapter explores the revolutionary political thought of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), or Fenians, who emerged in the 1850s as a radical alternative to constitutional nationalism. Rejecting parliamentary politics, the Fenians articulated a vision of Irish independence rooted in Rousseauian concepts of popular sovereignty and the ‘general will’, declaring themselves the provisional government of an Irish Republic. The chapter analyses how Fenianism, though often dismissed as lacking coherent political theory, developed a sophisticated critique of British rule by framing Ireland’s liberation as both a political revolt and a moral revolution. Unlike O’Connell’s loyalty to the Crown, the Fenians asserted that sovereignty inherently resided in the Irish people, making British rule illegitimate. Through examination of clandestine newspaper articles, proclamations, and memoirs, the chapter reveals how Fenianism combined militant separatism with democratic ideals, challenging prevailing models of representative government under the Union.

Abraham Lincoln's political writings were the works of a practical politician, not a political philosopher. Yet, his understanding of American politics was deeply informed by wide and penetrating reading in 19th century liberal political economy. This reading convinced him to be a determined opponent of slavery, and a vigorous promoter of henry clay's 'American system.' both of these programs retained their hold on Lincoln, and when, after his election to the presidency of the United States in 1860, the republic was plunged into civil war over slavery, Lincoln guided the nation toward the erasure of legalized slavery and to an economy favourable to commerce and manufacturing. His victory in the civil war, cut short by his assassination in 1865, nevertheless changed the political culture of the nation for the next sixty years, and set the country on the slow but inexorable path of civil equality for the freed slaves.

According to Bernard Manin, historically, representative government, based on the election of representatives, was conceived as an alternative to “direct democracy”, an ancient regime granting a central place to sortition. This chapter offers an alternative reading of the origins of representative government. In the wake of the French Revolution, Madame de Staël, Sismonde de Sismondi and Benjamin Constant – key members of the “Coppet Group” – theorized representative government not as an alternative to “direct democracy” but as an alternative to what the revolutionaries, from 1793 onward, called “representative democracy.” Recovering these French origins of representative government invites us to reconsider the historical relationship between representative democracy and representative government as well as the presumed connection between public opinion and democracy. These two points are explored in the chapter’s conclusion.

This chapter considers how Constant offered “representative government” as an alternative to Bonaparte and his acolytes’ version of democracy. It begins by examining Constant’s critique of Bonaparte’s plebiscitary sovereignty, then explores his alternative theory of constitutional legitimacy – one inspired by Hume’s motto that all governments rest on opinion. The chapter then traces how, from 1814 onward, Constant pragmatically redeployed that theory as political regimes changed in France. After analyzing Constant’s arguments against Bonaparte’s conception of opinion formation and presenting his own theory of “the government of opinion,” the chapter’s final two sections show how reconstructing Constant’s opinion-based theory of legitimacy helps explain why, in 1830, he defended both the French conquest of Algiers and the newly founded July Monarchy.

When the French Revolution erupted, political actors were confronted with the challenge of institutionalizing the power of the people. The debates that ensued were multifaceted as various conceptualizations of public opinion and popular sovereignty were considered. This chapter is not intended to provide a comprehensive study of the revolutionary deployment of each of these notions. Rather, the focus will be on Condorcet, Robespierre and key Montagnard theorists to illustrate how their shifting views on public opinion and popular sovereignty culminated in conflicting versions of “representative democracy” in the constitutional debate of 1793. For these theorists, “representative democracy” designated a mixed regime in which the people, in addition to electing representatives (representation), directly exercised popular sovereignty (democracy) between elections by frequently voting on political issues in citizens’ assemblies spread throughout the national territory.

After the experiences of the Terror and the Directory, there was widespread disenchantment with popular power. For Bonaparte and his collaborators, popular sovereignty and public opinion needed to be rethought to align with France’s aspirations for order, stability and strong leadership. In their view, direct popular sovereignty had to be restored in the form of plebiscites, while public opinion should be controlled and shaped by the government. The resulting political system was, in the words of a supporter of the Brumaire coup, “democracy purged of all its drawbacks.” This chapter unfolds chronologically, exploring Bonaparte and Pierre-Louis Roederer’s shifting conceptions of the people’s two powers from 1799 to the advent of the Empire in 1804. Special attention is given to how they revisited Rousseau’s accounts of public opinion and popular sovereignty to further their own agenda.

This chapter examines how and why the idea of “liberal democracy” was invented by French liberals in the 1860s. I argue that liberal democracy was conceived as an essentially polemical concept, defined in reaction to what French liberals identified as a defective form of democracy – namely, Napoleon III’s “Caesarist democracy.” I also show that, initially, one of the key meanings of liberal democracy was the idea of rule by public opinion. The first theorists of liberal democracy criticized Caesarism as a dangerous combination of plebiscitary sovereignty and silencing of public opinion. Meanwhile, they argued that the exercise of popular sovereignty should be confined to legislative elections, and that a free and independent public opinion should influence both elections and representatives. This perspective was articulated by figures such as Eugène Pelletan, Auguste Nefftzer, Charles Dollfus, Édouard Laboulaye, Anatole Prévost-Paradol and Émile Ollivier. The chapter further explores how the invention of the term “liberal democracy” overlapped with efforts to create a liberal tradition, as well as with a defense of settler colonialism in Algeria.

For many of us, Rousseau remains a central theorist of popular sovereignty. Less well known is that Rousseau was also among the first francophone political thinkers to theorize the concept of public opinion. This chapter makes two main claims. First, I argue that Rousseau advocated a sleepless public opinion as a complement to a sleepless sovereign. Second, I contend that, at key junctures of his work, Rousseau posited that direct popular sovereignty was constitutive of democracy. The chapter unfolds chronologically. I first reconstruct the mid eighteenth-century political debate in Rousseau’s native Geneva, which serves as a prelude to understand the conception of the people’s two powers that Rousseau associated with an ideal small city state in the Letter to d’Alembert, The Social Contract, and the Letters from the Mountains. I then turn to Rousseau’s account of public opinion and popular sovereignty in large countries, focusing on England and Poland. The chapter concludes by highlighting how, for subsequent generations of political thinkers in France, Rousseau’s distinction between public opinion and popular sovereignty opened new pathways for thinking about democracy.

This chapter interprets Tocqueville’s thought in the context of the political discussions that took place during the French July Monarchy (1830–1848). It begins by exploring how the ruling liberal elite, including figures like François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, responded to the radical republicans’ arguments about direct popular sovereignty and democracy. This confrontation sets the stage for understanding Tocqueville’s arguments about the people’s two powers in Democracy in America (1835–1840). In that text, Tocqueville criticized the idea of government by public opinion, which was advocated by his liberal contemporaries. Meanwhile, he rehabilitated direct popular sovereignty, as exercised at the local level in the New England township, interpreting it as the beating heart of political democracy and a source of “public spirit.” The concluding section considers how, faced with the impossibility of recreating the American township in France, Tocqueville began to look for alternative sources to foster “public spirit” in his home country, including the colonization of Algeria and the creation of great opposition parties.

Abraham Lincoln hoped to generate sufficient Whig support for his opposition to Kansas-Nebraska to get him elected to the senate in 1855. But that support failed to materialize, and in 1856, as the Whig party sank lower and lower under the burden of its own divisions, Lincoln joined a new anti-slavery party, the republicans, a coalition of northern Whigs and disgusted northern democrats. He ran against Stephen a. Douglas for the senate in 1858, and together they staged a memorable series of seven debates across Illinois. Douglas won the election, but Lincoln won a national reputation as an enemy of slavery's extension.