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.

Populism’s use of democratic practices and sources of authorization to undermine liberal institutions is the latest incarnation of a much older pattern, one inherent to popular sovereignty. I compare historical moments in which the principles of democratic rule and liberalism have been in tension or even seemingly incompatible with each other, the nineteenth-century United Kingdom and United States. By the time democratization appeared in the UK, liberalism was firmly entrenched as a public philosophy, and British liberals accordingly sought to limit the authority of “the people” through exclusions and an insulated and empowered state. In America, a founding moment in the construction of a liberal tradition came after the principle of democracy had been established as a defining principle of the regime. Many of the activists in the abolitionist movement sought to secure liberal principles not by restricting popular influence but by expanding and redefining “the people” so that it would undergird a more liberal political community. Neither of these efforts was successful, but are useful for thinking through similar tensions today.

The end of the twentieth century was once seen as the ultimate triumph of liberal, constitutional democracy, as new waves of democratization swept the world and as nation-states pursued bold plans of economic and institutional integration. By the third decade of the twenty-first century, however, constitutional democracies, liberal values, and global economic integration were under threat from a rising tide of populist authoritarianism. The distance between these two moments is not so great. In fact, their seemingly divergent moods and tendencies are best understood as distinct manifestations of common tensions that are fundamental to the idea of a sovereign and self-governing people. This introductory chapter argues that the resonance and endurance of popular sovereignty rest on its ambivalences and tensions, its contested status, and even its inherently fictional character. It demonstrates the value of revitalizing the study of popular sovereignty, conceived not as an ideological conviction or a rhetorical device but as a field of enduring questions through which seemingly disparate political phenomena can be understood.