978 - 1 - 107 - 13040 - 1 - Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective Edited by Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner

Popular sovereignty is a key component of modern political thinking, yet a history of the concept has not previously been attempted. This volume does not pretend to offer a comprehensive treatment. It arises from a collaborative project involving scholars specialising across a range of periods – spanning ancient, medieval, early modern and modern political thought. What has emerged is not a continuous and exhaustive account but a series of chapters that analyse some of the principal developments that reshaped the history of the doctrine. The term ‘sovereignty’ came into English from the old French word souveraineté, itself derived from the medieval Latin name for a superior, superanus. Etymology, however, is not a sufficient guide to meaning. For early modern writers trying to explicate the concept, it seemed necessary to place it within a constellation of terms stretching back into the Graeco-Roman past. For instance, in Chapter 8 of Book I of the 1583 French edition of Les six livres de la République, Jean Bodin renders souveraineté by the Latin noun maiestas.1 In its most basic sense, this Latin word connotes grandeur or authority. For example, in Livy’s history of Rome, in the process of recounting a conflict over the nature of dictatorial authority, the author refers to the ‘standing’ (maiestas) of the Roman senate.2 Furthermore Cicero, in defining the crime of lèse-majesté in his manual on oratory, De inventione, emphasised that injury to maiestas involved a diminution of greatness (amplitudo), authority (potestas) and dignity (dignitas).3 Majesty combined dignity with dominion in this context. Dignity could also connote ultimate status, as in the invocation of the supreme authority of the Roman people (per maiestatem populi Romani) in Sallust’s account of the conflict leading to the Jugurthine war.4 Sallust’s description appears as part of a speech by the Numidian prince Adherbal, who was seeking assistance from the Roman senate.