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Republicanism, Democracy, and Sovereignty

The American preoccupation in the early 1770s with written restraints on political power actually masked a peculiar confusion in the American mind about the nature of law. That confusion involved the problem of sovereign authority: the basis on which the government could command the actions of those who entered into the social contract. American revolutionaries from 1776 to 1787 groped their way toward several solutions, the most important of which was popular sovereignty. 30

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Locating sovereign authority for government turned on perhaps the most important concept of the revolutionary era: republicanism. The term derives from the Latin res publica, or "public thing." It refers to the conduct of the people's affairs for their interest and well-being rather than for the benefit of the ruler. Accordingly, republican government had its origin in the people.

There was no one document, such as Locke Second Treatise, that set forth the American scheme of republicanism. Until the Declaration of Independence the terms republican and democrat were hurled as epithets back and forth across the Atlantic. But by 1775 a body of republican thought began to emerge, first among anonymous writers and then in full flower in Thomas Paine Common Sense ( 1775). Paine made the use of invective into a positive good. As John Adams explained, Paine had done nothing less than "write down the ideas that were in the air." 31

Paine thrust a public will theory of law on the revolutionary generation. He called for independence based on actual representation and a written organic law, while rejecting out of hand the standard line of the King's ministers that, under the system of virtual representation, the colonists were already represented by every member of Parliament. He also spurned monarchical authority, parliamentary sovereignty, and the unwritten British constitution by claiming that if law was the command of the sovereign, then it had to be based directly on the fully represented interests of the people in the lawmaking body. Republican government, to Paine, promised a rule of law that would be more legitimate for the American people than that enacted by the English Parliament.

Existing political theory limited the scope of Paine's republicanism. American Whigs subscribed in 1776 to the theory of the French legal philosopher, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu that a republic could exist only in a small and socially homogeneous geographic area. Even defenders of British authority like Thomas Hutchinson conceded that popular rights necessarily diminished as the distance from the seat of government grew. "I doubt," he wrote in 1773, "whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony 3,000 miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy all the liberties of the parent state." 32 When the break with England finally did come, Americans quite naturally established their new republican governments at the state level. They did not think of creating a national republican government, because to have done so would have been theoretically absurd and contrary to the local interests they had consistently championed.

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 861


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