Popular science: The sovereign constitution of polity

The proposition that a people, conceived of and acting as a whole, is the ultimate ground of political creation and constitutional justification, implicates a set of analytical connections between politicalness, theory, holism, the people, collectivity, and constitution. Encounters with selected texts in political and constitutional thought serve to clarify different systematic articulations of these connections. Juxtaposing central tenets of Locke\u27s political theory with the constitutive theoretics of the American polity indicates a distinction between popular supremacy and popular sovereignty, two fundamentally different understandings of the people\u27s capacity as political maker. An interpretation of the Federalist Papers links the theoretical entailments of popular sovereignty with the design of a workable constitutional form, arguing that “the republican principle” adumbrated by Publius denotes the manner in which the design of the constitution binds the whole people as sovereign constitution-maker to the whole people as constituted citizens. The discussion then turns to the role of a written constitution in the justificatory logic of a polity grounded in popular sovereignty, setting the stage for abstract reflections on language and the constitution of polity. As an essential medium for the formation of a bounded people and its polity, language reveals itself as a source of potential orderliness that members of a community seek to mirror in their own acts of political constitution, be they foundings or the ongoing practices of polity. An interpretation of Hobbes\u27s attempt to generate a concept of political collectivity by setting out conditions for establishing linguistic orderliness at once sharpens the observations on language and polity and links them with the issue of the theorist\u27s relation to the polity he conceptualizes as a whole. Readings of Plato and Rousseau further explore the question of the orientation to the polity of the individual as theorist and as member of political community. The work concludes by moving from sovereignty understood as constitutive of polity to a reformulation of sovereignty as theoretically constitutive of a new way of conceiving the task of reflection on politics. Specifically, the final chapter advances and explores the consequences of the proposition that political constitution is an event of collective-self-theorization