Richard Tuck, a historical political theorist who specializes on the early modern period, defends Bodin/Hobbes from a charge of crypto- or quasi-totalitarians. They conceptualize a singular state, it's true, that monopolizes legitimacy and violence. Both men, quite fittingly, write in a period of severe turmoil and civil war (French Wars of Religion and English Civil Wars respectively). Tuck's major contribution, though, is to note their radical theoretical division of sovereignty from government. In the case of Hobbes, this distinction even permits a crypto-democratic origin of government. Unlike divine-rights of kings or Filmer's Patriarcha (i.e. monarchy derives from Adam's original fatherly authority), Hobbes posited a naked individualism. In the state of nature men banded together to end the war of all against all. They, in a primitive act of self-constitution, elect their own constitution (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) and cede their authority to this new sovereign (the mortal god of state, Leviathan). While many political theorists in 17th and 18th c. ignore (or misunderstand) this novel political arrangement, Rousseau latches onto it. Rousseau agrees with Hobbes that the state is a primitive compact to handover governing authority, but rejects alienating this original authority. Rather, the primordial mass grant authority to their government (whichever form) but reserve the right to reclaim it. They are (per the title) the "sleeping sovereign", with regnant government as vizier. If the sovereign awakes, due to trouble in the realm, it can reclaim this power from the vizier and reconstitute the polity. Tuck sees this Rousseuan theory at the heart of America's constitutional settlement.
As far as historical reconstruction goes, Tuck is right on the money. Bodin and Hobbes cannot be read as simply totalitarians avant la lettre. Rather, they're trying to find a constitutional arrangement that best defends a present system of governance from archaeological criticisms. Against critics, who appeal to natural law or scripture (both of which could justify divine-right of kings, as well as the right to rebel), they constructed a novel theory. In Rousseau's hands, this theory underwrites revolutionary change and democratic politics. And fundamentally, Tuck thinks the latter is really important because democratic governance has proved to be rather ineffective. The sovereignty/government distinction can save a fundamentally democratic nature for political society. The government may be oligarchic (a clique of professional politicians and technocrats), but they serve the People. Tuck primarily considers the plebiscite as the best means for the People to reassert their sovereignty. Through the plebiscite, the People can alter their constitution, set legislative agendas, or settle major policy issues (this book, based on a series of lectures, was published before Brexit). Tuck ties together early modern developments in political theory to some prescriptive thoughts for saving a democratic polity with a elected representative system (that seems farther and farther away from any democratic control).
If I were going to be frank, I'd say Tuck is a well-read naive goof. He's not stupid, but his proposal is airy and idealistic. He appeals to the plebiscite, but there's more to it than that. Who decides when a plebiscite should be conducted (i.e. who decides to wake up the slumbering sovereign?) and how it should be conducted? As stated, Brexit happened after this work came out. Many in the UK and abroad claimed that the plebiscite was not legitimate, that it was too close, that people voted and didn't really mean it. Blairite/neolib Labour has pushed to undermine Brexit, often appealing to a second referendum. If you're allowed to keep voting until "you" get what you want: what's the point of voting in the first place? Remainers claimed that the Leave campaign was underhanded, using all sorts of media tricks and lies (through arch-warlock Dominic Cummings). They claimed it was the revanchist politics of the old against the young, bigoted nationalists craving a return to the Empire. Pro-EU advocates claim the real people of the UK don't really want it. The Leave vote has also motivated Scottish nationalists to push national independence in EU terms (Scotland voted majority to Remain). All in all, critics have claimed a dozen different reasons why the People aren't the People. And they have a limited point: what is this abstraction called "the People"?
Perhaps, indirectly, the abstraction is what saves democracy for academics like Tuck. The abstraction (especially if it votes correctly) vindicates the concrete crudity of many ordinary folks. Per critics of democracy in the late 19th c. and early 20th c., why should the redneck who thinks the moon is made of cheese get the same vote as a nuclear physicist? This created attraction to the vanguard party of the intelligentsia in Leninist Communism, as well as the Great Man with a coterie of party technocrats per Fascism and Nazism. Both claimed Rousseauan themes and both claimed to speak on behalf of the people. Rousseau was no fan of democracy, even as he valorized the People. The way he could do so was through his distinction between general will and the will of all. The latter is the aggregate of wants, polling people according to their specific interests. The former is what is actually good for the People qua Commonwealth. The General Will was singular and organic, while the Will of All was piece meal and a private opinion. In this theory, it was quite possible for two things to radically diverge. A few, who could see far, could know the General Will, even if the majority (counting heads) opposed it. At first, the nobility were receptive to Rousseau's teaching (Marie Antoinette, dressed as little bo peep, made pilgrimage to the Genevan's tomb). Robespierre and his Jacobins saw themselves as the heirs to this theory: they alone knew what the Republic needed against its many enemies, foreign and domestic. They purged the popular counterrevolutionary insurgency in the Vendee. They purged the crude urban profanity and atheism of the Herbertists. They purged the mercantile and manufacturing bourgeoisie of both the Girondin and then Danton's less radical Jacobins. In all of these violent political moves, Robespierre claimed the mantle of the General Will. And after his fall, Napoleon would ultimately claim it again. His plebiscite for the imperial crown won thunderous support (even if it was a vote held with an army on the horizon). Napoleon was a true sovereign in this regard, putting the people back to sleep through a campaign of depoliticization (which, for not a few, was welcome reprieve to an era of guillotines).
If Rousseau could fit a Napoleon, then he was truly an heir to Hobbes. While in no way favorable to democracy, Hobbes was not a royal fetishist. Some scholars have convincingly argued that a subtext (whether intended or not) to Leviathan is praise for Cromwell. While himself a rebel and agent of subversion, Cromwell smashed the Presbyterians who promoted a divided sovereignty. Cromwell's Protectorate restructured the commonwealth around his office through a militarily imposed constitutional settlement (the Instrument of Government). The Lord-Protector held his own council of state (replacing the privy council) and had his own parliaments. Additionally, Cromwell's Independency had no truck with Presbyterian clericalism. The state was not beholden to a plurality of priests and the conscience of the nation would not be held hostage by a coven of clergy. Charles II's attempt to reclaim England came at the head of a Scottish Presbyterian army, whose pledge depended on Charles Stuart's adherence to the Solemn League and Covenant. And whether or not Hobbes was an admirer of Cromwell (or hoped Leviathan would let him return to England), his work found positive reception among Cromwellian Independents. While Independency opposed any return of the Church of England (whether episcopal or presbyterian), they still expected state management of religion. Every congregation was independent, but the Protectorate sent Triers out to see if the churches remained within the bounds of orthodox Protestantism.
Hobbes/Cromwell and Rousseau/Napoleon signify that Tuck's appeal to plebiscites needs broader contextualization. And while Hitler and Lenin, to pick odious examples, reflect a similar trend, it's not of necessity. Hobbes/Rousseau are not, contra idiot Popper liberals, proto-totalitarians, and Cromwell/Napoleon are not themselves totalitarians. However, they themselves become sovereigns and they depend upon a popular rule, even as the people are depoliticized and reorganized for state consolidation (often times war). And yet the purpose of this shift (and why, for Hobbes, sovereignty was alienable) was to secure peace. Only academic elite, who are often far from substantial loss or conflict, rejoice in revolution qua revolution. Many regular people join in for concrete goals, but they have hopes to shut it off at some point. Thus, these new regimes require new justifications. For Hobbes, this depended on his "state of nature" theory. Rather than imagine the Hobbesian state of nature is a historic time (where men's lives are, in Hobbes' famous lines: nasty, brutish, and short), it is a founding myth. It appears as "time out of mind", but it more accurately depicts the current moment he lived in. The time of nature was the time when men devolved into an atomized animal state. Giorgio Agamben grasps this point in his State of Exception: the return to the state of nature was hyper-nomic killing zone produced by state forces unleashed. Per Hobbes' analysis in Behemoth, the civil wars (and blood bath) happened because of divided leadership. Presbyterians (Hobbes' main villains) had turned the commonwealth against itself (manipulating Parliament to siege the crown). The end result is every man as his own leader (the state of nature). It's not the absence of authority, but the breaking of monopoly over authority. Thus, Independency may offer wide berth to general Protestantism, but it's still state sanctioned. The English republic beat and branded the radical Quaker, James Naylor, for claiming he was the second coming of Christ.
The concrete manifestations of Hobbes and Rousseau offer the actual vision of Tuck's reconstruction. Popular sovereignty does not mean a swarming or buzzing public sphere of popular politics. If the Glorious Revolution (1688) counts as an example of popular sovereignty (and there's an argument to be made that it would), then even a limited franchise parliamentary system limited politicization. It was the Whig dominated Parliament that would revoke the triennial act, replacing it with the septennial act. Parliament was not to be elected every three years, but seven. The rotten-borough system was a form of collective management, to keep Parliament from becoming too unstable and unwieldy. The senate and people had spoken against James II's absolutist project, supporting (actively) William of Orange's invasion. Plebiscites effectively work to limit popular politics (with plebiscites often following pre-planned and scripted out comes; in other words, I don't think Napoleon would have held a plebiscite if he thought he could lose). The irony is that the more formalized democracy is in political structures (whether representation, government mandated plebiscites, etc.), the less democratic politics can be. Hobbes was ok with this form of democracy: people should involve themselves in popular politics only if the state first says it's ok. The abstraction of The People can simply obfuscate how little concrete people actually have a real say. Instead, the Will of the People is supposed to cow opposition (regardless of how managed and curated this demonstration of said will actually is). The appeal to a nearly vitalist political economy, where the nation and other abstractions are treated as organic wholes, simply disguises the dirty reality.
The United States has had a complicated relationship with the idea of popular sovereignty. In a way, the Constitution of 1787 played the same kind of game that 1688 did. The convention (who met in secret, originally with an agenda to reform the Articles of Confederation, not junk it) claimed a popular sovereignty. The Constitution would become a political fetish, as the reified and binding will of the People who spoke to ratify. Early strict constitutionalists, like Thomas Jefferson, had no such fetishim (Jefferson thought new constitutions should happen every generation or so). Rather, his sticking to the letter of the constitution was to prevent the growth of the federal government into all kinds of new powers and authorities (a fear that came to pass). Jefferson was not against strong government, but he supported limited government. If there were no concrete limits (like the ones found in a written text), then the federal government would reduce states to provinces (as happened) and become the foreign tyrant that the American Revolution was supposedly against. Many allies of Jefferson joined him in this opposition to wide constitutional interpretation, but some focused more on the erosion of state sovereignty. A major (if not defining) element to early American politics was where sovereignty resided: the federal government, the People (viz. the Constitution and popular elections), or the states.
These positions were not absolute and they were no chosen ideologically. Often actual political actors switched from one position to another due to class considerations. The Confederacy was founded on J.C. Calhoun's ideas of state sovereignty and southern nationalism. But like Calhoun, CSA leaders shifted on the issues. Calhoun became a state sovereigntist when the federal government (under Jackson's administration) threatened the cotton kingdom with high, protectionist, tariffs. CSA officials broke their own commitments when it came to protecting cotton oligarchs from the economics effects of the war, as well as conscripting poor whites to continue the fight. Many northern, free-soilers, joined with the Union's efforts against the slave-power monopoly. Like Jefferson, they feared too much power in a private clique. But man of them (like Salmon Chase) abandoned the Republicans, who were rapidly becoming the party of industrial capital. The new industrial manufacturers (who were becoming, or fusing to, the financial element) increasingly placed sovereignty in the hands of the federal government. As long as they controlled the levers of power, it worked for them. When they felt a threat (populists or radicalized corporatists, like Bob La Follette) they blocked their opponents from power. The point of this overview is simply that support for where sovereignty is located reflects interests, often more so than an ideal polity. Cromwell secured his state by wooing large landholders and London's merchant community. Napoleon enriched budding industrialists and French merchants. These were elements to the location, and preservation, of sovereignty.
The real question, among these movers and shakers, is how the government relates to the supposed unalienable sovereignty of the People. If it exists (and we metaphorically imagine an abstract collective as an individual), who wakes it up? Does Tuck imagine academics or activists are the nervous system alerting the body to imminent danger? Is the sleeping sovereign supposed to naturally wake-up when the vizier's failures make too much noise and stir the People from its sleep? I don't really understand how any of this is anything but ex-post facto idealizing? Per the Hobbesian myth of a primordial assembly, why would not a government simply invent its own legitimacy? Whether a historical justification (Napoleon's plebiscite) or a mythic one (Hobbes' notion or Cromwell's doctrine of providence), either make a government's claims into a reality. The Constitution of 1787 depended upon an idea of majoritarian politics and Lockean representation to make the Constitution an act of popular self-determination. And even as Delaware and North Carolina voted against the Constitution, what choice did they have? Were they going to go it alone? The result is a kind of political legend to explain the current moment.
However, Tuck's point is generally useful. Sovereignty and government should be distinguished to prohibit totalization or other political evils. Ironically, that's why there's something to the Chinese legalist idea of the serene monarchy, explicated here. The sovereign's role is to be extra-political, upholding the realm of politics that operates at the level of government. The sovereign's role is to uphold a particular political society. If the sovereign becomes too involved in micromanaging government, it can lead to the politicization of the sovereign and a challenge to the political order as a whole. Elizabeth Tudor was perhaps one of the greatest monarchic sovereigns, often reserving her judgements from public view. In contrast, even as he was one of England's most godly kings, Charles I opened his sovereignty to challenge. He had become accustomed to political cut and thrust when he helped create popular and parliamentary pressure for war with Spain (the Blessed Revolution of 1622-24). Yet he acted as Prince of Wales. In 1640, facing a hostile Parliament, he dusted off these old tactics. They backfired, creating a divide Parliament, and a population increasingly frustrated with his attempt to manage the people. This anger gave a window to certain presbyterian-parliamentarians, who wanted to established an oligarchy. Charles, rightly, opposed being made into "the doge of Venice" (a fear he often expressed). To Charles' credit, he learned these lessons when it was too late. He would rather die a martyr than become a prisoner. Nevertheless, the confluence of sovereignty and governance bred its own turmoil.
Frankly, if the goods of democracy are to be preserved (which has more to do with economics, but that's another topic), the myth of popular sovereignty should be abandoned. It not only allows the veil to be pulled over peoples' eyes (thinking they have control when they, in fact, do not), but becomes a fetish and idol for political theory. A monarch represents the commonwealth, which includes the people, but the monarch does not act as the people, even if the monarch should act for the people. Why mystify what a king or queen does? Similarly, if the sovereign of a country is a council (as the Ephors were for Sparta, even as it had kings for governance), the same should be the case. They act for the people without claiming to act as the people. Concrete people have all sorts of wants and desires, and perhaps they're contradictory or bad for the whole. Majoritarian procedure in a parliament may be sufficient for their actions, but why use this to throw a blanket over the entire nation? Why pretend that it's my choice when it's not? Popular sovereignty is an effort to brainwash people into thinking the system's choice is actually their choice. Such manufactures the impotent rage that continues to legitimate the system, while also breeding a functional apathy. As the machinery of sovereignty and government becomes increasingly complex, so too does the resultant "deep-state" receive an indirect mandate. There's a reason why the last couple presidents who pursued an independent agenda from the Praetorian deep-state ended up destroyed. Kennedy's familial and personal politics resulted in a bullet to the head; Nixon's shady and manipulative behavior towards his departments resulted in impeachment. Both were internal coups, despite popular mythologizing. Both represented an entrenchment of an oligarchic bureaucracy, filled with technocrats and financiers of varying stripes. But because no sovereign can stand apart from the political cut and thrust (even if a lame or captured one), the pressures of government make action even more impossible.
It's not popular sovereignty that will reassert popular politics against whatever monolith chokes the people. Pace Tuck, plebiscites and government sanctioned participation will never really address substantial causes. Brexit is proof, where a bluff was called and the people (even in a slim margin) rejected European integration. Nearly five years later, it has yet to be implemented. The lack of legitimacy among many (but not all) of Britain's ruling elite has simply stalled out efforts. Effective popular politics, in the US and the UK, depended on people organizing on their own terms. Labour became a viable party because of the labor-union movement. Organizations of farmers and urban laborers created populism and labor-unionism in the US, which not only got FDR elected but created pressure for the limited reforms they wanted. But these organizations derived from class interests, not idealism of political design. Democratic politics, as happened in the past, grow out of interested-based organizing. The role of political ideology, like popular sovereignty, is basically to gut efforts. It was when people gave up hope in the two major parties, as well as the normal channels of authority, new popular options changed the board. In the mean time, you can simply express your own views without worry about an "Overton window" (itself a product of technocratic managed consent). You can simply ignore the fake TV drama of elected politics and pursue wisdom. The less you become enthralled to an abstraction (like The Will of The People) the more you can be free to flourish as God's image.
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