This is an excerpt from a new book 'Waiting for the People' by Nazmul Sultan, a young Professor in Canada-
Though the study of popular sovereignty has long been beset with fundamental disagreements, the conflicting series of propositions associated with the discourse of popular sovereignty have propelled, rather than stymied, its emergence as the ground of modern democracy.
Modern democracy is associated with strong institutions with deep foundations in constitutional law. 'Popular sovereignty' is restricted to periodic elections characterized by competition between large political parties which tend to be 'top-down' and open to pressure from vested interest groups. In North America, there is a 'sovereign citizen movement' of a right-wing, not to say red neck type. But that is not what is of interest to Sultan.
Popular sovereignty thrived, as it were, on its many claimants and detractors.
It was irrelevant. Fighting elections costs money. Vested interest groups push through their agenda in a manner that makes a mockery of popular sovereignty.
Reflecting on the revolutionary origins of the idea of popular sovereignty,
The American revolution was not really revolutionary. Nor was the Glorious Revolution. As for the French or Bolshevik or Chinese Revolutions, sovereignty very swiftly got concentrated in genocidal tyrants. Hannah's Aunt was as stupid as shit.
Hannah Arendt speculated that “if this notion [le peuple] has reached four corners of the earth, it is not because of any influence of abstract ideas but because of its obvious plausibility under conditions of abject poverty.”
The Chinese had a notion of 'the Mandate of Heaven'. If the rains fall at the right time and there are no earthquakes or invasions or insurrections, the people are happy enough with the Emperor.
I do not share the assumption that “abstract ideas” of the people were unimportant in the global career of popular sovereignty, or that “abject poverty” has a universal political import.
Abstract ideas- like those of the Marxist-Leninists- do have global 'careers' and 'abject poverty' certainly enabled their spread. Hilariously, some Stalinists and Maoists affirmed that their genocidal idols represented the will of the masses.
However, Arendt’s underscoring of the singular global reach of the popular sovereignty discourse
it had no such thing. Vast swathes of the world were turning Red at that time. It was only because Communism was utterly shit, economically speaking, that it ran out of steam.
captures a point of utmost importance: if democracy has now acquired the status of the sole “secular claimant” of political legitimacy,
It doesn't. China's rise and America's decline has seen to that. Still, maybe in Canada, they haven't got the memo.
it is primarily because of the incontestability of the foundation of popular sovereignty
This is foolish. The people understand that there has to be a sovereign to solve collective action problems and prevent 'concurrency' deadlock. Ideally, this will be transparently consultative but if you have woke nutters running amok then let the task be entrusted to sensible technocrats.
While representative and centralised forms of democratic government faced much scepticism in the global nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the sovereignty of the people, as an ideal, met with no meaningful normative challenge.
Sure it did. The people are as stupid as shit. They don't know what's good for them. An enlightened despot might be preferable to elected demagogues engaging in a dialogue of the deaf.
After storming the heaven of sovereignty, the “people” seemed to have conquered the globe – sometime between the great 18th-century revolutions and mid-20th-century decolonisation, and somewhere behind the main stage of social and economic history.
Where? Countries which had traditionally had 'limited monarchies' gave more power to parliament but the franchise was restricted to some degree or other till after the Great War. One might say that when the UN was constituted, as when the League of Nations was constituted, much bollocks about democracy was talked. But that was very swiftly abandoned.
The story of this singular conquest is generally told with reference to the tremendous social and economic transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries.
But those transformations could occur under autocratic regimes as much as oligarchic democracies.
But alongside these changes, the global rise of the people
Some nations rose- e.g. Japan- others fell prey to those rising nations.
was also a story of intellectual transformations.
But those transformations were occurring across the spectrum. They weren't univocal.
The stubborn persistence of diffusionist approaches in the global history of democracy
it is a fact that the UK 'diffused' democratic institutions to the sub-continent- not to mention the English speaking settler colonies.
means that the framework of dissemination and reception tends to obfuscate the transformation and reconstitution of democratic ideas themselves.
The problem is that those ideas were not univocal. They ranged across the whole spectrum.
As we shall see, anticolonial aspirants for popular sovereignty
they aspired to national, not popular, sovereignty. This might involve massive ethnic cleansing or chauvinistic majoritarianism.
were locked in a conflict with an imperial project that had – however contradictorily – sought to derive its legitimacy from a contesting, global narrative of peoplehood.
No. Empires derived their legitimacy from military might and the economic resources to sustain it.
It is partly due to the history of this conflict that the age of decolonisation doubled as the global vindication of popular sovereignty.
Nonsense! Decolonisation might mean the transfer of power to a monarchy or theocracy or a military or Communist dictatorship.
The strength and ubiquity of popular sovereignty lie in its roots as a discourse of authorisation.
The Tibetans may be authorised to tell the Han Chinese to fuck the fuck off but a fat lot of good this does them. But the same is true of the urban Iranian and his theocratic masters.
The modern recognition that the figure of the people no longer amounts to a “visibly identifiable gathering of autonomous citizens” shifted the primary stake of the popular sovereignty discourse to the processes of claiming authorisation from the abstraction called “the people.”
Why not claim authorization from the Galactic Overlords? The plain fact is that authorization is only effectively done by authority not by nonsense.
Invocations of the people in political modernity are necessarily an exercise in speaking in the name of an entity that does not empirically exist as a homogeneous, empirically locatable subject.
But such invocations can turn into actual authority over actual people. Only where this is happening, is it worthwhile giving ear to this discourse.
This foundational abstraction of “the people” notwithstanding,
It is not an abstraction if the people have actually given power to a particular person or party
much of the contemporary theoretical dispute around popular sovereignty
occurs only between useless tossers teaching stupid shit
concerns not whether the people are the ultimate political authority but instead how to enact and institutionalise the authority vested in it.
This is done by writing or amending a Constitution and creating legal and legislative and other constitutional institutions. This can also be done by Treaty law.
Regardless of how critical of popular rule a contemporary liberal political thinker might be, the procedure of popular consent – which traces the sovereignty of the state to the people – is essential.
This is a 'legal fiction'. It is not the case that proving that 'the people' did not approve the creation of the State would cancel its sovereignty. Thus even if every member of the Bench believes that the people hated the successor state, it would not mean it lacked sovereignty.
Radical democrats – while overwhelmingly critical of representative democracy – articulate their extra-institutional vision of democracy through the figure of the people.
So what? I articulate my extra-institutional vision of myself as Empress of India by claiming that my bootylicious figure sexually arouses 'the people'.
Deliberative democratic theorists
are useless tossers. That is why they
too find it necessary to account for a procedural authorisation of rights and laws in the will of the people, notwithstanding their attempts to render the people as “‘subjectless’ forms of communication circulating through forums and legislative bodies.”
Do they sodomize those legislative bodies? I suppose so. There probably are videos of such goings on circulating through the dark web.
Though disagreements over what exactly constitutes popular authorisation
People, albeit reluctantly, recognize there must be authority and the rule of law. Sadly, the thing costs money. You get as much of it as you can pay for.
– and how it must be politically instituted – are abundant, what has come to be beyond dispute, barring some residual protestations, is the idea that democratic legitimacy requires authorisation from the people.
It is enough if you win a plurality in an election to claim this though, a General, or Monarch, of Dictator, whose troops are good at shooting 'dissidents' might make the same claim. In North Korea, millions weep and wail in the street when their Beloved Leader dies.
The distinction between sovereignty and government was crucial to the formation of modern popular sovereignty as an authorizing ideal.
That may be true. Guys who talk this stripe of shite have shit for brains.
The concept of sovereignty, since its medieval origin,
its origins are pre-historic. In the Civil Law tradition, the Roman jurist Ulpian is quoted. The people (i.e. the Republic) transferred all their power to the Emperor. This does not mean City-States were not sovereign. Indeed Venice was sovereign from the seventh century.
had implied that “authorising the actions of a government” is not the same as “governing.”
Unless, the governor is authorizing the delegation of an executive power. Whether governing is done lawfully, inter vires, and with proper authority is a justiciable matter. However, unless an action of government is actually reversed by judicial action determines whether or not authority is distinct from governance. This involves the doctrine of political question, Executive privilege, etc. and nobody knows beforehand where the line is drawn or, indeed, whether there is a line at all.
Sovereignty thus meant not so much the holding of political offices as the power to decide who would constitute the government and to pass fundamental legislation.
No. A sovereign may hold no political office nor have any power to decide anything. Mad King George was a sovereign but, during the Regency, he didn't enjoy even personal liberty.
As Richard Tuck has shown, the sovereignty-government distinction was constitutive of the idea of popular sovereignty since Jean Bodin and ran through canonical modern political philosophers ranging from Thomas Hobbes to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
That may be true but they had and have no power.
The very emergence of a constitutional theory of public authority in the early modern era was likewise indebted to the incipient doctrine of popular sovereignty.
No. It was indebted to Ulpian who said that the people transferred all their power and 'imperium' to the Sovereign who might combine the offices of Head of State, Head of Government, Chief Magistrate, and Commander in Chief of the armed forces.
The limited government of the constitutional order had become theoretically possible owing to the “unlimited” power ascribed to the people.
No. It became theoretically possible because concrete models of limited monarchy as well as Republics under the rule of Law actually existed
It was, however, only with the two classical revolutions of the late 18th century – the French and the American –
presaged by the British 'Glorious Revolution'. Sadly, the French rapidly went off the rails. The American Common Law tradition kept them on the straight and narrow. It wasn't till Andrew Jackson that you had 'popular sovereignty'.
that popular sovereignty began to acquire the public legitimacy that it now enjoys.
What fucking legitimacy? Canada is run by a dynastic twat. The US has a choice between two very old men. A vast Eurasian bloc, under the leadership of China, appears likely to dominate the second quarter of this Century.
The French and American revolutionaries vigorously debated the meaning of popular sovereignty, taking paths that were neither identical nor short of novel challenges.
The French fucked up. Still, Napoleon did reintroduce slavery.
The limited government of American constitutionalism
not to mention their love of slavery and genocide
and the transformative vision of French republicanism
which transformed Europe into a bunch of Kingdoms ruled by Napoleon's family before yielding to the 'Holy Alliance' which re-established the Bourbon dynasty.
both nevertheless emboldened the idea that the people are the source of authority and the foundation of legitimacy.
This idea was there in Ulpian.
For all its centrality to the modern constitutional order, popular sovereignty has been no less salient to extraconstitutional claims of political authorization.
Because shouting 'Power to me and my chums!' is less effective than shouting 'Power to the Pee-pul!'
The invocation of popular sovereignty both by institutional and extra-institutional actors, as Jason Frank has argued, is enabled by the fact that “the people” is more of a claim than a determinate object.
By contrast, Fason Jrank has argued that sodomizing the Andromeda Galaxy is enabled by the fact that my dick is 2.5 million light-years in length.
The “constitutive surplus” of popular sovereignty – the surplus that remains despite institutional authorization derived from the people – tends to outlive the founding event and continues to serve as a reservoir for popular claim-making.
Not to mention its serving as a reservoir for my cum which is dripping off the Andromeda Galaxy- much to its chagrin.
Modern democracy rode the waves of many popular insurrections,
unless it didn't at all.
and the founding power associated with the self-authorizing people
not to mention the self-sodomizing people who are the very Andromeda Galaxy they belligerently bugger
shaped institutional ideals of democracy
ideally democracy wouldn't need to use a deodorant every five minutes.
as much as the dictions of popular politics. To complicate the matter further, the essential claimability of the people
which is like the essential claimability of the ass-hole of the Andromeda Galaxy which keeps getting sodomized by all and sundry.
means that both governmental and extragovernmental actors
not to mention drunken hobos
could invoke the name of the people, thus transcending strict constitutional protocols for popular authorization.
If the constitution protects free speech then I am entitled to claim that the people support my right to sodomize the Andromeda galaxy.
Indeed, as Bryan Garsten argues, the multiplication and contestability of “governmental claims to represent the people” is a germane feature of modern representative democracy.
Sadly Gryan Barsten rejects this argument on the grounds that it is the sort of shit that the Andromeda Galazy might spout after being buggered senseless.
Still, it is remarkable that a Professor of Political Science gets that a 'germane feature' of 'representative democracy' is that it represents the demos- i.e. the people. Amazing discoveries of this type are constantly being made even at Yale University. Who knew?
Turning to Nazmul's dissertation, we find that Nazmul didn't get that Indian anti-colonialism was religious in nature. Hindus wanted a Hindu nation. Muslims wanted a Muslim nation. That is what they got. True, in the Fifties many believed in the magical powers of Socialism but disillusion set in rapidly. What we have in the subcontinent is popular leaders, some dynastic, who represent not 'the people' but their own people as defined by creed, caste, or language. 'Janata' or 'Awami' 'People's Parties' may be corrupt, are frequently authoritarian, but what nobody can accuse them of is knowing Hegel or Rousseau from a fucking hole in the ground.
Nazmul 'theorizes the colonial paradox of peoplehood that Indian anticolonial thinkers grappled with in their attempts to conceptualize self-rule, or swaraj.
Anti-colonial, like pro-colonial, thinkers in India had to grapple with the fact that the place could not feed, defend or govern itself. The alternative to Pax Britannica was war-lordism of the sort that plagued China. The Brits had to introduce gradualist representative government so as to expand the tax-base and thus set off a virtuous circle of infrastructure and public good provision. But there was a 'holdout problem'. Essentially, there was an incentive to refuse to cooperate on the grounds that Indians were slaves. The opposite incentive- viz. to cooperate so as to be able to change oppressive laws and customs (e.g. Vitthalbhai Patel's ban on inter-caste marriage)- disappeared after the Great War because it was obvious the age of Empires had ended. India could have got what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got in 1922. It was already a member of the League of Nations. Gandhi- fearful that 'Muslims and Punjabis' would use violence to seize power from the cowardly Hindus- tried to delay the departure of the British.
The persistence of the developmentalist figuration of the people
Fuck that. Some Indians did 'developmentalist' work and were rewarded by the Raj. But Indian politicians were not interested in any such thing. This did not change much after Independence though some leaders who were born in poverty could implement sensible programs- e.g. free school meals in Kamraj's Tamil Nadu.
brought the swaraj theorists in confrontation with the not-yet claimable figure of the people at the very moment of disavowing the British claim to rule.
This is meaningless. Could there be Hindu-Muslim unity? No. Muslims would ethnically cleanse Hindus wherever they were in the majority. They might also conquer the country in alliance with martial races. That was what Gandhi said would happen unless the Brits handed over the army to the INC before fucking off.
Revisiting this underappreciated pre-Gandhian history of the concept of swaraj
which dates back to Shivaji and attained mass appeal under 'Bal, Pal & Lal' though it already figured in the thought of Swamys like Dayanand Sarasvati.
and reinterpreting its Gandhian moment, (a chapter in his book) offers a new reading of Gandhi’s theory of moral self-rule.
Why bother? The truth is obvious. Gandhi had unilaterally surrendered in 1922. He couldn't quit politics because he needed money from the industrialists for his crackpot schemes. So, periodically, he performed a 'tamasha' before returning to the cultivation of some stupid fad alongside his crazy acolytes.
I argue that Gandhi simultaneously rejected the developmental framework and the very criterion of popular authorization.
along with sex. Gandhi said everybody should stop bumping uglies. Did you know that babies come out of vaginas? Avoid that organ like the plague.
The result was a displacement of the source of political action from the collective to the self.
No. The result was that Congress became reconciled to being a Hindu party and took office and proceeded to impose its stupidity on Muslims which is why they turned overwhelmingly to the League. What mattered was that the Brits had made running a Province virtually idiot-proof. Granted, there might be famine or ethnic cleansing or both, but, hey!, if that's what the natives are into, let them have it by all means.
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