| 释义 |
- Origins
- Popular sovereignty in the United States of America 1850s
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
{{Redirect|Sovereign people|the Curaçaoan political party|Sovereign People}}{{Liberalism sidebar |Ideas}}Popular sovereignty, or sovereignty of the peoples' rule, is the principle that the authority of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, through their elected representatives (Rule by the People), who is the source of all political power. It is closely associated with social contract philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Popular sovereignty expresses a concept and does not necessarily reflect or describe a political reality.[1] The people have the final say in government decisions. Benjamin Franklin expressed the concept when he wrote, "In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns".[2]Americans founded their Revolution and government on popular sovereignty, but the term was also used in the 1850s to describe a highly controversial approach to slavery in the territories as propounded by senator Stephen A. Douglas. It meant that local residents of a territory would be the ones to decide if slavery would be permitted, and it led to bloody warfare in Bleeding Kansas as abolitionists and proponents of slavery flooded Kansas territory in order to decide the elections. An earlier development of popular sovereignty arose from philosopher Francisco Suárez and became the basis for Latin American independence. Popular sovereignty also can be described as the voice of the people. Origins{{Republicanism sidebar}}Popular sovereignty in its modern sense, is an idea that dates to the social contracts school (mid-17th to mid-18th centuries), represented by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), author of The Social Contract, a prominent political work that clearly highlighted the ideals of "general will" and further matured the idea of popular sovereignty. The central tenet is that legitimacy of rule or of law is based on the consent of the governed. Popular sovereignty is thus a basic tenet of most Republics, and in some monarchies. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau were the most influential thinkers of this school, all postulating that individuals choose to enter into a social contract with one another, thus voluntarily giving up some of their natural freedom in return for protection from dangers derived from the freedom of others. Whether men were seen as naturally more prone to violence and rapine (Hobbes) or cooperation and kindness (Rousseau), the idea that a legitimate social order emerges only when the liberties and duties are equal among citizens binds the social contract thinkers to the concept of popular sovereignty. A parallel development of a theory of popular sovereignty can be found among the School of Salamanca (see e.g. Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) or Francisco Suarez (1548–1617)), who (like the theorists of the divine right of kings and Locke) saw sovereignty as emanating originally from God, but (unlike divine right theorists and in agreement with Locke) passing from God to all people equally, not only to monarchs. Republics and popular monarchies is theoretically based on popular sovereignty. However, a legalistic notion of popular sovereignty does not necessarily imply an effective, functioning democracy: a party or even an individual dictator may claim to represent the will of the people, and rule in its name, pretending to detain auctoritas. That would be congruent with Hobbes's view on the subject, but not with most modern definitions that see democracy as a necessary condition of popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty in the United States of America{{Main|Popular sovereignty in the United States}}The application of the doctrine of popular sovereignty receives particular emphasis in American history, notes historian Christian G. Fritz's American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War, a study of the early history of American constitutionalism.[3] In describing how Americans attempted to apply this doctrine prior to the territorial struggle over slavery that led to the Civil War, political scientist Donald S. Lutz noted the variety of American applications: {{quote|To speak of popular sovereignty is to place ultimate authority in the people. There are a variety of ways in which sovereignty may be expressed. It may be immediate in the sense that the people make the law themselves, or mediated through representatives who are subject to election and recall; it may be ultimate in the sense that the people have a negative or veto over legislation, or it may be something much less dramatic. In short, popular sovereignty covers a multitude of institutional possibilities. In each case, however, popular sovereignty assumes the existence of some form of popular consent, and it is for this reason that every definition of republican government implies a theory of consent.|Donald S. Lutz[4]
}}The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. With their Revolution, Americans substituted the sovereignty in the person of King George III, with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Thenceforth, American revolutionaries generally agreed and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people.[ This idea—often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed—was not invented by the American revolutionaries. Rather, the consent of the governed and the idea of the people as a sovereign had clear 17th and 18th-century intellectual roots in English history.[5]] 1850s{{Main|Origins of the American Civil War|Kansas–Nebraska Act}}In the 1850s, in the run-up to the Civil War, Northern Democrats led by Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois promoted popular sovereignty as a middle position on the slavery issue. It said that actual residents of territories should be able to decide by voting whether or not slavery would be allowed in the territory. The federal government did not have to make the decision, and by appealing to democracy Cass and Douglas hoped they could finesse the question of support for or opposition to slavery. Douglas applied popular sovereignty to Kansas in the Kansas Nebraska Act which passed Congress in 1854. The Act had two unexpected results. By dropping the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which said slavery would never be allowed in Kansas), it was a major boost for the expansion of slavery. Overnight outrage united anti-slavery forces across the North into an "anti-Nebraska" movement that soon was institutionalized as the Republican Party, with its firm commitment to stop the expansion of slavery. Second, pro- and anti-slavery elements moved into Kansas with the intention of voting slavery up or down, leading to a raging civil war, known as "Bleeding Kansas." Abraham Lincoln targeted popular sovereignty in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, leaving Douglas in a position that alienated Southern pro-slavery Democrats who thought he was too weak in his support of slavery. The Southern Democrats broke off and ran their own candidate against Lincoln and Douglas in 1860.[6] See also- Claim of Right 1989
- Consent of the governed
- Declaration of Arbroath
- Legitimacy (political)
- Man-made law
- Parliamentary sovereignty
- Philosophical anarchism
- Retroversion of the sovereignty to the people
- Scottish Constitutional Commission
- Sovereign Citizen Movement
Notes1. ^Leonard Levy notes the "doctrine" of popular sovereignty that it "relates primarily not to the Constitution's [actual] operation but to its source of authority and supremacy, ratification, amendment, and possible abolition" (Tarcov 1986, v. 3, p. 1426, 1426).
2. ^{{cite book|author=Benjamin Franklin|title=The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mOEjB0Pdq8oC&pg=PA398|year=2003|publisher=Edited by Ralph Ketchum; Hackett Publishing|page=398}}
3. ^Christian G. Fritz, [https://books.google.com/books?id=ZpKCvUacmSwC&pg=RA1-PA168&lpg=RA1-PA168&dq=christian+g+fritz+%22american+sovereigns%22&source=web&ots=UjY_WKHNjv&sig=Y2_7OZMg6ksk_866oiD44FArH-w&hl=en#PRA1-PA1,M1 American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War] (Cambridge University Press, 2008) at p. 290, 400. {{ISBN|978-0-521-88188-3}}
4. ^Lutz 1980, p. 38
5. ^On the English origins of the sovereignty of the people and consent as the basis of government, see: Reid 1986–1993, v. III, pp. 97–101, 107–110; Morgan 1988, passim
6. ^Childers 2011, pp. 48–70
{{reflist|30em}}References- Adams, Willi Paul (1980), The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era, University of North Carolina Press, {{ISBN|978-0-7425-2069-1}}
- Childers, Christopher (March 2011), "Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay", Civil War History 57 (1): 48–70
- Conkin, Paul K. (1974), Self-Evident Truths: Being a Discourse on the Origins & Development of the First Principles of American Government—Popular Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and Balance & Separation of Powers, Indiana University Press, {{ISBN|978-0-253-20198-0}}
- Lutz, Donald S. (1980), Popular Consent and Popular Control: Whig Political Theory in the Early State Constitutions, Louisiana State Univ. Press, {{ISBN|978-0-8071-0596-2}}
- Lutz, Donald S. (1988), The Origins of American Constitutionalism, Louisiana State University Press, {{ISBN|978-0-8071-1506-0}}
- Morgan, Edmund S. (1977), "The Problem of Popular Sovereignty", Aspects of American Liberty: Philosophical, Historical and Political (The American Philosophical Society)
- Morgan, Edmund S. (1988), Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, W.W. Norton and Company, {{ISBN|0-393-30623-2}}
- Peters, Jr., Ronald M. (1978) The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: A Social Compact, University of Massachusetts Press, {{ISBN|978-0-8071-1506-0}}
- Reid, John Phillip (1986–1993), American Revolution III (4 volumes ed.), University of Wisconsin Press, {{ISBN|0-299-13070-3}}
- Silbey, Joel H., ed. (1994), "Constitutional Conventions", Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System (3 volumes ed.) (Charles Scribner's Sons) I, {{ISBN|978-0-684-19243-7}}
- Tarcov, Nathan (1986), "Popular Sovereignty (in Democratic Political Theory)", in Levy, Leonard, Encyclopedia of the American Constitution 3, {{ISBN|978-0-02-864880-4}}
Further reading- {{Citation |last=Childers |first=Christopher |title=The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics |publisher=University of Kansas Press |year= 2012 |pages=334}}
- {{Citation |last=Etcheson |first=Nicole |title=The Great Principle of Self-Government: Popular Sovereignty and Bleeding Kansa |journal=Kansas History |volume=27 |date=Spring–Summer 2004 |pages=14–29}} links it to Jacksonian Democracy
- {{Citation |last=Johannsen |first=Robert W. |title=Stephen A. Douglas |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1973 |pages=576–613}}.
{{Liberalism}}{{Authority control}}{{DEFAULTSORT:Popular Sovereignty}} 4 : Popular sovereignty|Politics of Scotland|Constitution of the United Kingdom|Jean-Jacques Rousseau |