Remarkable forms of self-governance and collective identity developed within these carceral communities, another means of dealing with the deprivations of captivity. They encouraged solidarity and mutual support, especially among poorer prisoners. And yet, ironically, they could enable greater social control within the prison. Chapter 4 analyses the corporations – headed by elected or customarily selected stewards – through which prisoners managed life inside. They provided the foundations for practical and symbolic collective identities that prisoners also communicated to the wider world. Based around the administration of charity, this culture of self-governance gave rise to customs and practices by which prisoners collectively negotiated their time in prison. Yet although potentially empowering, the formal extension of officeholding to prisoners also represented the wider diffusion of early modern state power into prison populations and an attempt to exert greater social control over them. Indeed, this chapter challenges our view of early modern self-government – often understood as a mechanism of local autonomy and negotiation with higher powers – by discussing an extreme example in which participants could be actively involved in constricting their own liberty.

After introducing the twentieth-century academic skepticism about civics and any component of patriotism in it, and the significant educational deficit and civic harm this approach has caused, this chapter turns to two sections: (a) Tocqueville’s Praise of America’s Reflective Patriotism patriotism – including the six components he sketches in a reflective patriotism, with the role of Christianity balanced against self-interest; and (b) American Civic Exemplars of Patriotism and Reform – featuring questions raised by the study of Douglass, Lincoln, Stanton, Anthony, and King.

In 1739, the author who wanted to go by the name of Sophia, A Person of Quality, published a text called Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, A short and modest Vindication of the natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men. This title gives voice to what has become an established way of thinking about the history of liberation, and of feminism in particular – that is, as a history of the vindication of rights, as Mary Wollstonecraft would go on to echo in her own titles, A Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, and then, when it appeared that women were not included in mankind, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

In the context of the new Arctic policies of the EU, it is of importance to bring to the fore elements of the long-standing histories that connect the Arctic and Europe, as those histories may help us to understand challenges of today. With that background, the aim of this chapter is to shed further light on the term ‘Eurarctic’, primarily being limited, however, to a focus on the colonial history of Greenland as well as present EU– Greenland relations. The history of the Nordic/Arctic to which the history of Greenland is anchored, is long, complex, and at times controversial, so the intention is to modestly take a bird’s-eye view and focus on some of the most significant aspects.

This chapter addresses the question of how to understand Socrates’ willingness to obey the law and accept the death penalty in the Crito, seemingly in contrast to his rebellious attitude towards legal authority in the Apology. Its aim is to show that in submitting to the laws of Athens, Socrates does not betray his own ideal of self-government, in the sense of personal autonomy and freedom, which he explains and defends in several dialogues. However, it argues that Socrates conceives of self-government as the freedom to subject oneself to what used to be an external authority, but in such a way that this authority now becomes an integral part of one’s own moral stance. In order to throw further light on this issue, it also draws upon the discussion of the rule of law in the Statesman, where the notion of self-government similarly plays an important role.

This chapter explores the nature of the legislature and its relationship to constitutional government, focusing in particular on the importance of legislative agency and the dynamics that frame its exercise. The chapter begins by reflecting on the objects of legislative action, arguing that authorising a legislative assembly to legislate changes who legislates but not what it is to legislate. The object of legislative deliberation and action should be the common good and securing this end requires agency. The assembly faces many challenges in exercising agency, which it is structured to overcome, partly by way of its relationship to government, a relationship that goes well beyond acts of legislation. The relationship between legislature and government shapes the character of a constitutional order and bears on the relationship between legislature and the people. The legislature’s duty is to represent the people, which makes self-government possible. The legislature should deliberate and act for the people and be accountable to the people, with legislative deliberation taking its place in a wider public conversation. The legislature’s capacity for agency informs how legislative acts should be understood to change the law and helps explain the moral importance of legislative freedom and the limits on that freedom.

The political idea of self-government has a natural elaboration, which is that a society is self-governing when it is ruled by the will of the people of that society. A variety of attempts to vindicate popular will conceptions of self-government exist but I argue that they are fatally flawed. In its place, we need a conception of self-government that is deflationary (that is does not rely on the existence of a popular will) but nevertheless quite demanding. I discuss some deflationary accounts of self-government and I argue for an account that emphasizes an egalitarian collective decision-making process but that also recognizes the importance of outcomes. I argue that attention to the conditions necessary to the achievement of self-government of an egalitarian sort is essential to how we are to think of the proper aims of constitutional institutions. We need to attend to how information is disseminated to citizens and how citizens can have the sophistication necessary to understand information. An egalitarian conception of self-government can show how the constitution of a society should be structured so as to achieve equality in these two dimensions of the information system.

Here I move from historical analysis to philosophical explication of the concept of liberty, and I introduce the main conceptual components of the idea of freedom I defend.

This chapter argues the freedom requires the capacity for self-government or autonomy as one of its components.

This chapter examines the post-WWII era where the idea of exclusive Convention Peoples Party (CPP) radicalism and Pan-Africanism rests most thickly. It argues that debates about the CPP’s Citizenship Act complexifies its pan-African credentials. Also, the CPP’s political philosophy was not radical and distinct compared to its opponents, as it fits within a broad liberal/ cosmopolitan tradition rooted in Europe and America. So-called conservatives were oftentimes more radical, as shown in parliamentary debates on the “Motion of Destiny.” Contentious discussions about whether to achieve self-government by proclamation or negotiation, are obscured by the dyad of radical versus conservative. Debates about federalism, regionalism, and unitary government remain unexplored because the grand narrative rebukes the opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist agenda, while granting him hero status. Nkrumah’s prolific writing and the squeezing out of his opponents after he became Prime Minister in 1957 are identified as the architects of Ghana’s grand narrative.

Chapter 4 presents the paradox of republican emancipation, a paradox based on the ambivalence of republican freedom at the time of the revolution. On the one hand, republican freedom is the status of those who are already masters of themselves. Freedom is independence and it is this independence that makes them capable of governing with competence and virtue. On the other, freedom is the newly claimed right of everyone, or anyone, not to be dominated – regardless of their virtue, or their economic and social situation, that is, regardless of their capacity to self-govern. But how can one reconcile the universal claim of freedom as nondomination with the republican supposition that the free person ought to be already socially, economically, and intellectually independent to be able to self-govern? If the many are incapable of self-governing, how can they ever become independent from the government of the few – how can they ever emancipate themselves? This chapter presents four instances of this paradox: the debate on passive/active citizenship, Condorcet’s position on the emancipation of slaves, Guyomar’s argument for the emancipation of women, and Grouchy’s proposal for changing the way we think about human dependence.

This essay first argues that popular sovereignty or self-rule depends on self-understanding and then points to a set of practices and activities that make this kind of popular self-understanding more likely, even or especially in a populace as vast, complex, and divided as that of the United States of America in 2020. Brief analyses of works by Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Walt Whitman, and Danielle Allen set the theoretical context for an overview of face-to-face conversation programs and an argument about the necessity of programs such as these to complement legal and institutional efforts to strengthen democracy.

The Precipice of Hope: a conversation with Hahrie Han The concluding contribution to the volume features a conversation with scholar and activist Hahrie Han. Drawing on Han’s extensive experience as an adviser to popular movements across political divides, the conversation revisits the main questions of the volume: what is popular sovereignty and how can we understand and repurpose this historically important concept today? What is a people and under what conditions can a sense of solidarity across a vast array of social and political differences be build? Last but not least, are the idea and regulative ideal of rule of the people, and the very existence of a people that can govern itself, necessarily fictional, and to what extent is fiction an indispensable dimension of political concepts and norms.