Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective

Richard Bourke is Professor in the History of Political Thought and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. He has been a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino and a Fellow at the Institute of Advance Study in Berlin. He has written extensively on the history of enlightenment political thought and on modern Irish history. His books include Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas (2003, 2012) and Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (2015). Quentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academia Europaea, and a foreign member of many other learned societies. His scholarship, which is available in more than twenty languages, has won him numerous awards, including the Wolfson Prize for History in 1979 and a Balzan Prize in 2006. His books include The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 volumes, 1978), Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), Liberty before Liberalism (1998), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008), Forensic Shakespeare (2014) and a three-volume collection of essays, Visions of Politics (2002).

• Introduction Richard Bourke; 1. Athenian democracy and popular tyranny Kinch Hoekstra; 2. Popular sovereignty as control of officeholders: Aristotle on Greek democracy Melissa Lane; 3. Popular sovereignty in the late Roman republic: Cicero and the will of the people Valentina Arena; 4. Popolo and law: late medieval sovereignty in Marsilius and the jurists Serena Ferente; 5. Democratic sovereignty and democratic government: the sleeping sovereign Richard Tuck; 6. Parliamentary sovereignty, popular sovereignty, and Henry Parker's adjudicative standpoint Alan Cromartie; 7. Popular sovereignty and representation in the English Civil War Lorenzo Sabbadini; 8. Prerogative, popular sovereignty, and the American founding Eric Nelson; 9. Popular sovereignty and political representation: Edmund Burke in the context of eighteenth-century thought Richard Bourke; 10. From popular sovereignty to civil society in post-revolutionary France Bryan Garsten; 11. Popular sovereignty as state theory in the nineteenth century Duncan Kelly; 12. Popular sovereignty and anticolonialism Karuna Mantena; 13. Popular sovereignty in an age of mass democracy: politics, parliament, and parties in Weber, Kelsen, Schmitt and beyond Timothy Stanton; Bibliography; Index.

'Popular sovereignty is the most fundamental, most widespread and least understood principle of political legitimacy in the world today. As the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of the subject over the longue durée, Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective will become a pivotal work in the history of political thought.' David Armitage, Harvard University, Massachusetts