1 People power – Christopher Barker and Robert G. Ingram
2 Machiavelli’s ‘moments’ – Catherine Zuckert
3 Death and taxes in Machiavelli’s Florentine state – Danielle Charette
4 Taming the Parliament: John Locke on legislative limits, prerogative and popular sovereignty – Nathan Pinkoski
5 Montesquieu and the theory of limited sovereignty – William Selinger
6 The revolution for society: rethinking popular sovereignty, American independence and the Age of the Democratic Revolution – James M. Vaughn
7 Filippo Mazzei’s Atlantic revolutions: a new dawn for popular sovereignty or populism? – Anna Vincenzi
8 Popular sovereignty as populism in the early American republic – Joshua A. Lynn
9 Like a god on Earth: popular sovereignty in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America – Heather Pangle Wilford
10 Plural voting and popular government in Victorian Britain – Greg Conti
11 Modern representation and the popular will – Susan Shell and Paul T. Wilford
12 Sovereignty, God and the historians – Robert G. Ingram
13 Conclusion: what is popular sovereignty? – Mark Blitz
Index

People power offers an exciting new account of popular sovereignty. ‘We the people’ is a phrase that confers instant political legitimacy in the public imagination, no matter what the political project. But who are the people? How did they come into being? Should they be sovereign? And what does it mean to be sovereign? These are perennial questions in self-governing societies, and they have been given fresh urgency during a long moment of unease about the people’s power.

This book tells the story of the people’s rise in political power and offers a new interpretation of popular sovereignty and its limits. Contributors reconsider crucial thinkers such as Machiavelli, Locke, Tocqueville and Mill and reassess moments of popular power in republican Florence, the American Revolution and Jacksonian democracy. They offer original insights into central issues of popular power, including tax powers, executive leadership, voters’ competence and the limits of religious authority. Ultimately, the book argues that the best way to vindicate the people’s power is to be as attentive to the possible areas of popular overreach and oligarchic substitution as to the claim to power itself.

People power will be required reading for students and scholars of popular sovereignty and of special interest in an era of popular mobilisation and political unrest.