Sovereignty, Opinion, and Brexit
Paul Sagar
13 Aug. 2020
In the run-up to the 2016 Brexit vote it was commonplace to hear both sides – but especially those in favour of Leave – arguing about sovereignty. Where should this lie? Who should wield it? Did it matter that Britain pooled some with the EU, or did we need to ‘take back control’, re-asserting sovereignty on an independent basis?
If you look up ‘sovereignty’ in a dictionary, you’ll get a definition such as ‘supreme authority in a state’. This makes it sound straightforward and uncontroversial. Unfortunately, it is anything but. And this ought to be of concern for anyone hoping for Britain to achieve a smooth and orderly exit from the EU in the coming years.
Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651)
The locus classicus of thinking about sovereignty remains the work of Thomas Hobbes, in particular his 1651 masterpiece Leviathan. Hobbes argued that the sovereign was the person who passes final judgement, who decides the outcome in situations of political contestation. Without a sovereign, Hobbes infamously warned, human beings would fail to find lasting peaceful agreement, and would slip into their ‘natural’ condition of aggression, violence, and permanent war. With a sovereign – a final judge – this could be avoided: peace could be secured, and nothing less than the blessings of civilisation would follow in its wake.
Yet this basic message came with important caveats. Whoever held sovereignty had to be absolute: their decision was beyond question, or else another source of war would be re-opened, as competing interests appealed to different sites of adjudication. Furthermore sovereignty meant the use of terror: people were forced to stick to peaceful behaviour for the fear of breaking the laws. The job of the sovereign was, at base, to terrorize people into obedience. Importantly, however, sovereignty was not assigned unconditionally: people ought to obey their absolute sovereign only insofar as they were granted protection from other sources of violence. If a sovereign failed to protect you, then you could not reasonably be expected to consent to the sovereign’s rule. For Hobbes, absolute sovereignty thus had its foundation not (as previous thinkers supposed) in the Divine Right of Kings, but in the consent of ordinary people.
This last fact was crucial. On the one hand, Hobbes believed that he had offered nothing less than the first science of politics, and claimed to have proved by analytic deduction what the true nature of sovereignty was. Ultimately, it was nothing less than the ‘soul’ that gave life to the great Leviathan, the monstrous artificial creature that we now call the modern state. Yet sovereignty was also fragile. The Leviathan state, animated by sovereignty, could only do its job if people continued to believe in its power and legitimacy. After all, if everyone simultaneously stopped believing in the power of the state to enforce the laws, and so began breaking them, there would not be enough police and military personnel to uphold the edifice. Sovereignty only works if people believe it works, and go along with it. Without that belief, the state itself will quickly come crashing down.
David Hume
In the century after Hobbes we see the emergence of two distinct strands of thinking about sovereignty. Some – like the Scottish philosopher David Hume – judged that because what really mattered was what people believed about their rulers, there wasn’t much point in focusing on sovereignty at all. Better to go directly to what underlay it: what Hume called ‘the opinion of mankind’. Like Hobbes, Hume argued that because decisive physical force and sheer weight of numbers always rest with the ruled and not the rulers, political power is a function of the willingness of the ruled to go on being ruled. Hume believed that this was largely beyond the control of philosophers and political scientists, however, and if one wanted to avoid the misery of a civil war (or even just bad government), then coming up with fancy theories of sovereignty wasn’t going to help. What one had to do was focus on developing well-designed political institutions that functioned to manage opinion. Abstract questions about the theoretical nature of sovereignty were largely irrelevant to getting this right. (This was a lesson taken directly to heart by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in their attempts to forge the new American Republic on the other side of the Atlantic during the 1780s. The Federalist Papers, which defended the new American constitution, carry the direct imprint of Hume’s ideas).
An alternative vision was put forward by the Genevan philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. According to the Swiss, sovereignty really did matter – but crucially, it had to be popular. Rather than resigning final decision-making power to a unitary figure who ruled absolutely via fear, a free people – and hence any genuinely legitimate state – had to retain some direct democratic control over its political affairs. Anything less than this was tyranny.
The consequences of Rousseau’s re-casting of sovereignty were complex, but dramatic. The bloodshed of the French Revolution was, at least in part, caused by citizens attempting to work out the practical realities of something like Rousseau’s vision of popular sovereignty. But in a context where removal of monarchical rule had generated systematic political uncertainty, trying to enact direct popular sovereignty proved politically cataclysmic – as the Jacobin’s reign of Terror ultimately proved.
Benjamin Constant
In the nineteenth century, when surveying the wreckage of the Revolution and subsequent attempts to fix the problems it had unleashed, the French thinker Benjamin Constant urged that it was no surprise that things had turned out as badly as they had. Despite its apparently decisive simplicity, in situations of political turmoil sovereignty theory just introduced endless contestations about who ought to be in charge, and why. Until, that is, a strongman (in France’s case, Napoleon) came along and enforced political rule. In other words, Hobbes’s solution of imposed terror would be the necessary fix to the anarchy unleashed by demands for popular sovereignty. In practice, Rousseau’s vision of egalitarian participation, of justice for all, produced the opposite. Better, Constant suggested, to go back to Hume, and the emphasis on managing opinion through well designed institutions, without expecting theories of sovereignty to help sort things out.
These lessons remain salutary today. Brexit will not lead to the 21st Century equivalent of the French Revolution. But it will certainly fail to settle deep disputes and controversies in British politics simply by claiming to have restored ‘sovereignty’ to Westminster. This is because popular opinion never stops wanting answers to the problems that the holders of that opinion (i.e. ordinary citizens) are continually faced with. If taking back control means job losses, diminished national prestige, and a sense of serious political betrayal, then telling the British people not to worry because they once again have their sovereignty will count for little.
As those who led the charge for Brexit – some of whom now find themselves in Cabinet – are increasingly discovering, taking back control is the easy part. It’s what you do with the control that matters. Invoking vague notions of sovereignty butters no parsnips by itself. And if you can’t butter the parsnips, the opinion of mankind will give you very short shrift indeed. Britain’s future is likely to be interesting, but not in a good way.
Paul Sagar is lecturer in political theory in the department of political economy, King’s College London. He is the author of The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton University Press)
