Popular Sovereignty is defined as “controversial political doctrine according
to which the people of federal territories should decide for themselves
whether their territories would enter the Union as free or slave
states.”[1] Simply put, it is a rule of the people created by the people. This
is how Tocqueville defined democracy.[2]
The social state of America is eminently democratic and based on two facts
that dominate all other factors: 1) Democracy constitutes a social state, and
2) popular sovereignty. Democracy is society’s way of being. Sovereignty of
the people, a form of [v. the essence of] government. Nor are they
inseparable because democracy is even more compatible with despotism
than with liberty. While democracy and sovereignty are not analogous, they
are correlative, as sovereignty is a fiction concept without democracy.[3]
The principle of the sovereignty of the people, which is more or less always
found at the base of nearly all human institutions, ordinarily remains there as
if buried. It is obeyed without being recognized, or if sometimes it happens,
for a moment, to be brought into the full light of day, people soon rush to
push it back into the shadows of the sanctuary.[4]
In America, the principle of the sovereignty of the people is not hidden or
sterile as it is in certain nations; it is recognized by the mores, proclaimed by
the laws; it spreads freely and reaches its fullest consequences without
obstacles.[5] If there is a single country in the world where the true value of
the dogma of the sovereignty of the people can hope to be appreciated,
where its application to the affairs of society can be studied and where its
advantages and dangers can be judged, that country is assuredly America. I
said before that, from the beginning, the principle of the sovereignty of the
people had been the generative principle of most of the English colonies of
America.[6]
Today in the United States, the principle of the sovereignty of the people has
attained all the practical developments that imagination can conceive. It has
been freed from all the fictions that have been carefully placed around it
elsewhere; it is seen successively clothed in all forms according to the
necessity of the case.[7] Sometimes the people as a body make the laws as
at Athens; sometimes the deputies created by universal suffrage represent
the people and act in their name under their almost immediate supervision.
There are countries where a power, in a way external to the social body, acts
on it and forces it to follow a certain path. There are others where force is
divided, being simultaneously inside and outside the society. Nothing of the
sort is seen in the United States; there society acts by itself and on itself.
Power exists only inside it; hardly
hardly anyone may even be found who dares to conceive and specially to
express the idea of seeking power elsewhere.[8]
Tocqueville was impressed by the process of the principle of popular
sovereignty and modern democracy. He felt that it resembled regimes of
the history but is based on a new and different kind of authority.[9] It was
not a regime; however, a condition of sovereignty. The difference between
the regime and popular sovereignty was that there was a certain degree of
control by the ruling body.
Popular sovereignty is something that is buried within the constitutions of
colonies. The government was once created by the people to reach
collective decisions, and if you do not have a government, then you cannot
have people.[10]
Tocqueville believed in a different viewpoint of constitutionalism. He felt that
it was more than a device for limiting power and protecting rights.
[11] Tocqueville argues that laws and constitutions must be examined in the
light of the regime or whole social order underlying them. This analysis
brought forth a new democratic revolution known as “Popular
Sovereignty”. Popular Sovereignty threatens to destroy intellectual and
moral character of citizens and make them unfit for liberty.[12]
Tocqueville places great significance on the American colonists “equality of conditions” as to
why democracy and popular sovereignty flourished in America. But what is easily overlooked is
the role property did, and did not, play in allowing that equality of conditions to not only take
root, but to even exist in the first place. First, Tocqueville makes abundantly clear such equality
is at the foremost of the American social structure, because “liberty is not the principal and
constant object of [American] desire; what they love with undying love is equality; they rush
toward liberty by rapid impulses and sudden efforts, and if they miss the goal, they resign
themselves; but without equality nothing can satisfy them, and rather than lose it, they would
agree to perish.” (Tocqueville 2012, 89). It is though Tocqueville misread Patrick Henry’s
rousing call to arms of March 23, 1775 before the Second Virginia Convention thinking Henry
said, “Give me [equality] or give me death!” (Henry 2020).
But it was exactly those equality of conditions, especially in New England, where Tocqueville
believed, “Not even the germ of aristocracy was ever deposited in that part of the union. No
influences except intellectual ones (a kind of intellectual patronage) could ever be established
there” (Tocqueville, 76). And that equality of conditions was socioeconomically unique to
America, for it represented “not the aristocratic liberty of their mother country, but the
bourgeois and democratic liberty of which the history of the world did not yet offer a complete
model” (Ibid., 51). And it was in the very definition of that American rejection of aristocracy,
the prohibition of sole inheritance of entire landed estates between generations of aristocrats
through primogenitor, that Tocqueville identified as what pushed American equality “to its last
stage” (Ibid., 78).
But by prohibiting such sole recipient inheritance to the eldest son, and instead requiring the
dividing up of the property amongst all the progeny, the colonies were able to flip the property
owner’s desire to “immortalize himself in his great-nephews” (Ibid., 83) to establish a perpetual
system that “makes aristocracy spring from the soil” (Ibid., 79), and instead, just look at his
immediate family, which will then drive the landowner to sooner or later sell the property.
Because of that, equality of conditions can survive multiple generations because in choosing
between the two extremes of equality, the system is now set up so that all are capable of
receiving the same rights, are not granted greater rights because they have access to limited
multi-generational property, and therefore protect the sovereignty of all (Ibid., 89)
-----
Henry, Patrick. March 3, 2020. “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death!” The Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation. https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/learn/deep-dives/give-me-liberty-or-give-
me-death/.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America: In Two Volumes. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund,
Incorporated, 2012.
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