Popular support for war is widely understood to solidify Britain’s sense of itself in the eighteenth century. This chapter argues that objections to war shape Britain’s identity in the closing decades of the century, as the people are called upon to evaluate the justness of the nation’s acts in war. These acts are understood to be public acts, authored by each and every individual, including those who do not directly wage war. The attention to public responsibility coincides with renewed scrutiny of war’s harms, and the moral urgency of recognising and halting war’s killing animates philosophical essays, sermons, and poems, including works by Jeremy Bentham and Anna Letitia Barbauld. The period’s anti-war arguments foreground concepts of injury and responsibility that anticipate later developments in international law and ongoing discussions in moral philosophy.

This chapter asks how ‘the people’ has been mobilised in contemporary literature as an anti-hegemonic category for imagining collective life in times of crisis. Reading a handful of poems written by Sean Bonney, D. S. Marriot, and Andrea Brady, the chapter’s hypothesis is that poetic address – the axis of communication, the deictic situation that obtains between articulation and understanding – acts as a cipher for the people in moments of social upheaval. Specifically, this chapter shows how poetic form bears witness to the people as an antagonistic social force defined by class, race, and gender, but also as a category that disarticulates – or has been forcefully disarticulated from – labour and its traditions and cultures.

Farage also used ‘we’ to show that he identified with ‘the people’. The ideas underlying this phrase need to be understood in their historical context, since they vary depending on particular national histories, but all share a common ancestor in ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. British democracy needs to be traced back to British thinkers such as Buchanan, Hobbes and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. This is relevant because the historical discourse surrounding the phrase ‘the people’ was central to the development of democracy, and is continuous with today’s challenges to it. The various notions of ‘the people’ were connected with the ‘sovereignty of the people’ and the ‘sovereignty of parliament’, the latter being expressly challenged by populist parties like UKIP, in favour of direct democracy, and the same trend was evident in the post-referendum governments. The expression ‘the common people’ played an important role in British political discourse. Its early meaning changed radically until it was replaced by ‘ordinary people’, which in the Brexiter demagoguery was equated with ‘the people’, in opposition to ‘the elite’.

Right-wing populism has been widely implicated in the destabilization of democracy in traumatic events such as the presidency of Donald Trump. Chapter 4 examines the cultural, economic, and communicative aspects of populism and its origins, addressing arguments for including populist parties and leaders more effectively in conventional party politics, before moving on to a deliberative response. It may be possible to engage citizens attracted to populism (though not leaders) in deliberative terms. Populist leaders can be demagogues uninterested in abiding by democratic norms of any sort, least of all deliberative ones, though it might be possible to induce somewhat better democratic behavior on their part. Populist citizens are more promising in deliberative and democratic terms because some of their concerns and insecurities have a reasonable core: society really is dominated by an elite, just not the one that populist leaders stress. This core could be reached by deliberation, however much its concerns have been more effectively exploited by demagogues to date. Discursive psychology can be deployed in thinking about deliberative bridges to populist citizens. Populist citizens may be attracted to democratic innovations such as deliberative mini-publics. Contestatory deliberation involving democratic activism can counter populist leaders.

Constitutional identity, although remaining distinct from national identity, does like the latter carve out an imagined community. It must process and reprocess material to promote a vision that integrates the ethnos and the demos in a constitutionally viable manner. In this pursuit, the elaboration of constitutional identity relies on three principal interpretive devices: negation, metaphor, and metonymy. The objective is to integrate the polity as a whole, the individuals subject to the constitution, and the plurality of groups within the nation that possess a legitimate claim to constitutional recognition. The resulting construct must draw on national identity to reinforce unity and depart from the latter where necessary to maintain constitutional integrity – e.g., to deescalate ethnic strife within the polity by banning ethnic-based political parties. The turn to populism poses a challenge that calls upon reframing constitutional identity. Indeed, as populism by its very nature casts only part of the people as the people, and labels those not included as the enemy, it calls for disaggregating and recombining existing liberal constitutional identities. We illustrate the adverse effect of populism’s recourse to ethnic cleavages and to religion in reframing constitutional identity through the salient example of Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

The main questions concerning English governance addressed by medieval theorists were: (a) the division of authority between the Church, headed by the Pope, and the king; (b) the extent to which the king was bound by law and custom; (c) whether he was bound to act with the counsel and consent of his magnates; and (d) whether he could legitimately be resisted or even deposed for violating moral, religious, customary or legal constraints.

When we use the term “amendment,” we are analogizing changes that happen outside the four corners of the text to the those that happen within it – and we know that the inside, textual ones happen through specified procedures that have a democratic component. The amendment idea thus suggests democratically legitimate change – a change carried out by the proper procedures, in recognizable ways. Moreover, the term “amendment” generally connotes legitimacy – not just a change, but a change made according to the rules and one that leaves the basic endeavor of democratic constitutionalism in place. If Congress or the president simply began violating the constitution, for instance, few would reach for the word “amendment” to describe what was happening. The idea of amendment also evokes something persistent and distinct from the constant tussle and fluctuations that characterizes ordinary politics. The author therefore proposes that when we talk about amending America’s unwritten Constitution, we are not typically thinking about evolution in our practices and understandings, but are trying to describe a special set of durable changes that we ought to regard as democratically legitimate.

A core function of constitutions, unwritten and written alike, is to constrain the actions of government officials. This chapter argues that a constitution cannot serve this function unless communities of “constitutional participants” pay attention to and engage with the constitution and its meaning. Participants are needed not only to develop shared understandings of ambiguous text but also to create a credible threat of sanctions, legal or otherwise, for unconstitutional actions. The chapter further suggests that American states may have, at least on certain issues, constitutional communities too sparse to activate constitutional constraint. Finally, the chapter briefly problematizes the creation of constitutional communities, asking whether and how they could be forged in the states without generating costs of capture or further polarization.

George Sand’s novels did much to shape the sensibilities of the young people who welcomed the February Revolution. During March and April, she helped prepare the election of a Constituent Assembly by writing “Bulletins” published by the Interior Minister Ledru-Rollin. Her voluminous correspondence illustrates vividly the enthusiasm of many romantic writers during the first weeks of the revolution. Her rejection of the proposal by feminist journalists that she stand for election opens a window on divisions among feminists in 1848. But for our purposes, Sand’s primary importance lies in the way her correspondence illustrates both the flowering of the cult of “the people” in the spring of 1848 and the causes of the disillusionment that set in early. After May 15 Sand ceased to believe that the people were capable of governing themselves. Her relations with the worker-poet Charles Poncy are considered at length because they can stand as an epitome of both the success and the failure of Sand’s attempts to get close to “the people.” While much of the scholarly literature stresses Sand’s lifelong adherence to “the principles of 1848,” I argue that there was little left after 1848 of the ideals that she had brought to the February Revolution.

After a general discussion of the experience of proscription, exile, and “internal exile,” we follow each of our nine writers into exile, retirement, or a new life. We then compare their assessments of particular events and individuals: notably the prison massacres during the June Days and the portraits of Auguste Blanqui and Adolphe Thiers. We turn to three themes: 1) the religiosity that pervaded the language of the ‘forty-eighters; 2) the repeated recourse to theatrical language and imagery to describe both the course of events and the tendency of revolutionaries to mimic the words, deeds and gestures of the first French revolutionaries; 3)the cult of “the people” elaborated as a source of democratic legitimacy by some of our writers and criticized by others. In conclusion, I maintain that in their effort to explain the failure of the democratic republic in 1848–1852, our writers raise questions that continue to concern us. Their central concern was the problem of democracy. When, and how, would the people be able to govern themselves? How was it that in the space of two generations democratic revolutions had twice culminated in Napoleonic dictatorship? There are worse questions to ask if we are to begin to understand the failures of democratic politics in our own time.

This chapter draws attention to the making of claims about popular preferences to justify a change in church government in the Revolution of 1688-90. The analysis shows how ‘the inclinations of the generality of the people’ came to be included in Scotland’s 1689 Claim of Right to demand the reinstatement of presbyterian church government. This formulation drew on the language of grievance to present what was described as the laity’s instinctive and historical desire for a church without prelacy, while assertive crowds and volunteer forces demonstrated the potential for popular violence if these wishes were not acknowledged. The ensuing Revolution settlement gave constitutional authority to the preferences of the people in church government, stimulating an ongoing debate between presbyterians and episcopalians on the people’s true desires. Pamphleteers provided geographical and social assessments and proposals for direct polling while petitioners sought to demonstrate counter-opinions, reinforcing the prominence of opinion at large in Scottish politics.

This chapter examines the constitution-making processes in the history of the Turkish Republic to provide an alternative explanation for the authoritarian foundations of Turkish constitutions different from the established explanations based on the center-periphery dichotomy or military tutelage argument. Drawing on Claude Lefort’s theory of modern democracy, the chapter argues that the dominant constitution-making practice in Turkey has been the hegemonic-totalitarian logic, which causes the performative closing of the empty place of power by one actor that claims to exclusively represent the people’s will. This embodiment claim constitutes the authoritarian foundation of Turkish constitutions. These embodiment claims were made by the Republican Peopleʼs Party for the 1924 Constitution, by the military following a coup for the 1961 and 1982 Constitutions, and by the Justice and Development Party as a populist actor holding the parliamentary majority in the 2007, 2010, and 2017 amendment processes. The Constitutional Conciliation Commission ‘Anayasa Uzlaşma Komisyonu, AUK’ could have achieved a democratic departure from the path-dependent authoritarian constitution-making approach.

The end of the twentieth century saw the temporary decline in the importance of the concepts “sovereignty” and “nation-state.” As the hopes for a cosmopolitan post-national world unraveled, “sovereignty” and “nation-state” were deemed to be outdated and obsolete for at least two reasons. On the one hand, globalization and internationalization have allegedly transformed the Westphalian world order of independent sovereign states, bringing about a future of post-state cosmopolitan universalism. Sovereignty, a concept co-original with the statist imaginary, was believed to be destined to wither away together with the nation-state. On the other hand, sovereignty was targeted for its incompatibility with the principles of constitutionalism and the rule of law. Perhaps, sovereignty, understood as the highest absolute indivisible power, was fit for the old regime of contesting nation-states. However, it was claimed, it is alien to contemporary constitutionalism with its core principles of separation of powers, constitutional limitations, and international cooperation.

The following chapter has two main sections that partially overlap. Perhaps they just convey the same idea in two different ways. In the first section I present a conceptual analysis of the terms people, sovereignty, and popular sovereignty to reach the conclusion that in a constitutional democracy sovereignty, and so political authority, is divided and shared among different state organs, contrary to Rousseau’s conception, and that the “people” – the voters – are only one of the constituted powers. In the second section, I argue that the concept of popular sovereignty as constituent power of the people, rather than transposing onto the subject “people” the idea of absolute power of a monocratic institution (the Kingship), is instead the foundational principle of the framework of limited power typical of the contemporary constitutional state. The “people,” I therefore conclude, have to be understood as occupying a vital double role within our constitutional imaginary – supplying both the constituent power and a constituted power.

‘The king reigns but does not govern’. This formula, which according to Carl Schmitt was coined by Adolphe Thiers, a French liberal historian and politician, enemy of Bonapartism yet suppressor of the Paris Commune, has become today the most important formula in the study of liberalism. Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben both understand this formula as capturing something essential about liberalism as a form of governmentality that guides the conduct of individuals either in the absence, or beyond the reach, of the sovereign power and its legislation through normative and normalizing orders that escape democratic control. Although not discussed as such, this formula also underlies recent attempts by jurists and historians of political ideas such as Martin Loughlin and Richard Tuck to bolster the sovereignty of the state against new forms of governing without the state that emerge in neoliberalism. This chapter proposes a new reading of this formula by situating it on the terrain of constitutionalism, rather than on that of sovereignty. In so doing, it seeks to bring together in a meaningful exchange these two different critical approaches to neoliberalism, and the emerging debates they harbour. One debate is between those who advocate a Foucauldian and biopolitical and those who adopt an Agambenian and politico-theological analysis of neoliberal governmentality. The other is the one between advocates of a republican, constitutional approach to democracy and those who argue for the revival of popular sovereignty on the basis of new ‘democratic’ interpretations of Bodin and Hobbes.