The Matter of Opinion: Popular Sovereignty and the Constitution of Social Reality

This thesis sets out to clarify the concept of sovereignty in order to clear the way towards a better understanding of how state design might better promote popular sovereignty. After an analysis of the different accounts of sovereignty as they appear in modern and contemporary political theory, the first chapter sets out a revised conception that seeks to establish, or re-establish, it as an attribute of natural persons. The aim here is to better capture the core features of sovereignty while avoiding both theoretical incoherence and empirical implausibility. Chapter Two brings this alternative conception into dialogue with Thomas Hobbes’s canonical treatment of sovereignty in Leviathan. The central two chapters go on to explore how recent and contemporary work in the fields of social ontology and social epistemology, most notably that of Amie Thomasson, John Searle, Margaret Gilbert and Miranda Fricker, might help us to think more clearly about sovereignty in general and popular sovereignty in particular.

Chapter Five provides an analysis of the contemporary state form that seeks to establish the historical origins, current location, and distinctive features of sovereignty as found in contemporary Anglo-America. The idea is to show how sovereignty in our revised, and by now hopefully clarified, sense could be mobilised in the reform of this existing state. Chapter Six sets out the principles, derived from the preceding discussion, that might underpin a state form characterised by a tendency or bias towards popular sovereignty. It concludes by sketching some of the institutional forms that might help realise those principles in the day-to-day conduct of politics.