Discuss the philosophical basis of doctrine of popular sovereignty, and its significance for mankind. (1997)
Popular sovereignty holds that the ultimate authority to make, unmake and judge government belongs to the people, and that rulers exercise only delegated power. Its classic statement is Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s The Social Contract (1762). Its philosophical basis is the moral equality and self-ownership of persons; its significance lies in having become the only generally accepted source of legitimacy in the modern world.
Philosophical Foundations
- Medieval roots. Marsilius of Padua (Defensor Pacis, 1324) made the legislator the whole body of citizens or its weightier part. Johannes Althusius (Politica, 1603) placed the rights of sovereignty in the people as an association of associations, inalienable and only entrusted to rulers.
- Consent. If people are born free and equal, no one has natural authority over another. Power becomes legitimate only by agreement, which makes the people its source.
- John Locke (Second Treatise, 1689) kept a supreme power in the people to remove or alter a legislature that breaks its trust.
- Rousseau went further: sovereignty is the exercise of the general will, inalienable and indivisible. Government is a mere commission, and laws the people has not ratified are void. Freedom is obeying self-made law.
- Revolutionary texts. The French Declaration of 1789 (Art. 3) placed the principle of all sovereignty in the nation; Abraham Lincoln‘s Gettysburg Address (1863) gave it the formula government of the people, by the people, for the people.
- Jürgen Habermas relocates it in procedures of public deliberation rather than a single collective will.
Critiques
- Legal indeterminacy. John Austin (1832) placed sovereignty in a determinate superior, and “the people” is not one. A. V. Dicey (1885) accordingly separated legal sovereignty (Parliament) from political sovereignty (the electorate).
- Elite theory. Joseph A. Schumpeter (1942) reduced democracy to competition among leaders for votes; Robert Michels found an iron law of oligarchy in every organisation.
- Fiction. Edmund S. Morgan (Inventing the People, 1988) called popular sovereignty a necessary fiction that elites invoke to govern.
- Majoritarian abuse. Jan-Werner Müller (What Is Populism?, 2016) shows populists claiming that they alone speak for the real people, turning the doctrine against minorities and institutions.
Significance for Mankind
- Democracy. It grounded universal suffrage, accountable government and the right of resistance.
- Decolonisation. Transferred to peoples as self-determination, it appears in the UN Charter (Art. 1(2)) and General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960), and delegitimised empire.
- Human rights. A people’s authority is bounded by the equal dignity that grounds it.
- India. The Preamble opens with We, the people of India and says the people give to ourselves this Constitution. Universal adult franchise (Art. 326) was granted from the first election. The doctrine’s dependence on inclusion was tested in May 2026, when the Supreme Court upheld the Election Commission’s special intensive revision of electoral rolls with notice-and-hearing safeguards after critics warned of mass exclusion.
Conclusion
Popular sovereignty rests on a sound premise: authority among equals can come only from those who are ruled. Its practice needs constitutionalism to protect minorities and institutions to give “the people” a voice; without them it becomes either an elite fiction or a majoritarian weapon.