Sovereignty and democracy, with a look at David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends

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Notes

1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 150.

2 Ibid., 150.

3 Ibid., 111.

4 ‘The word Person […] hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation;’ Ibid., 112.

5 David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2008), 7 and 38.

6 Hobbes, Leviathan, 133.

7 Ibid., 120.

8 ‘ … they which find themselves grieved under a Democracy, call it Anarchy.’ Ibid., 130.

9 Ibid., 130.

10 Ibid.

11 Cf. Susan Moller Okin, “‘The Soveraign and his Counsellours.’ Hobbes’s Reevaluation of Parliament.” Political Theory 10, no. 1 (1982): 49–75.

12 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1689), 2, 1967, 367.

13 Hobbes, Leviathan, 230. Cf. 9: ‘[…] that great Leviathan called a Common-wealth, or State (in latine Civitas) which is but an Artificiall Man […] in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.’

14 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 407.

15 Ibid., 326.

16 ‘From this Institution of a Common-wealth are derived all the Rights, and Facultyes of him, or them, on whom the Soveraigne Power is conferred by the consent of the People assembled.’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, Kap. 18, ‘Of the Rights of Soveraigns by Institution,’ 121).

17 ‘Men being […] by Nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this Estate, and subjected to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent. […] When any number of Men have so consented to make one Community or Government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one Body Politick, wherein the Majority have a right to act and conclude the rest.' (Locke, Two Treatises, 330–31).

18 Hobbes, Leviathan, 118–19.

19 Locke, Two Treatises, 352.

20 Ibid., 274.

21 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), edited by Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 239.

22 David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (London: Profile Books, 2018).

23 Referring to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die.: What History Tells Us about Our Future, Ibid., 226.

24 Cf. Ibid., 218.

25 Ibid., 224.

26 Ibid., 145.

27 Ibid., 152.

28 Ibid., 217.

29 Ibid., 12, repeated on pp. 47 and 121.

30 Ibid., 134.

31 Ibid., 137–38.

32 Ibid., 134.

33 ‘To get from Hobbes’s Leviathan to a fully developed form of modern democracy took about three hundred years.’ (Ibid., 134).

34 Against Runciman’s assurance that the ‘Leviathan is practically impossible to kill’ (203) chapter 29 of Leviathan, ‘Of those things that Weaken, or tend to the Dissolution of a Common-wealth’ might be adduced.

35 See chapter 3, ‘Technological takeover!’

36 Ibid., 128.

37 Ibid., 133.

38 Ibid., 134

39 Ibid., 205.

40 Ibid., 197.