On Inventing the People

I really love Edmund Morgan’s work. He is so skilled at weaving together political theory and theology with on-the-ground political and social practices that, at times, he seems to be little less than a magician.

As in his other books, he does exactly the same thing here. This time, Morgan’s big question is “How did the English—both in Britain and the America—come to recognize the ‘people’ as sovereign?” This is a tough question, and (as of the 17th century) this was a brand new formulation of sovereignty. Before the period of Morgan’s study, generally sovereignty was believed to lie in the monarch, who was granted his position by God himself. Because the monarch was God’s representative in a state, they couldn’t really be challenged. Yet, as Morgan points out, divine right was just as much a fiction as the sovereignty of the people. In truth, “sovereignty” doesn’t exist at all, and we’re forced to create intellectual maps to conjure them into existence. That’s not to say it’s bad, just that sovereignty doesn’t exist in the real, material world.

In the English context, the theory that the king held divine right came shattering down with the coming of the English Civil War. In the chaos, there were numerous attempts to put together a legitimate government, but doing so was remarkably difficult given that no person or group could be classified as “sovereign.” After the period of the Commonwealth, and recognizing the difficulty of this issue, the House of Commons actually back-tracked and reinstituted recognition of the king as sovereign. While this was a perfectly fine patch during the reign of Charles II, the arbitrary nature of James II’s dominion made it impossible to maintain this fiction. With the English Bill of Rights, the House of Commons maintained that sovereignty lay in “the people,” but the House of Commons functioned as their representatives within the British polity and, in the process, developed a new situation where the many are really guaranteed by the few.

In North America, the picture wasn’t all that different. The events in England, until the coming of the American Revolution, were partially reflected in the nature of colonial administration; that said, the level of self-governance specific colonies had depended on the current ruler—given Oliver Cromwell’s Puritanism, he permitted the government of Massachusetts Bay to do as it wished, and Massachusetts effectively became an autonomous province (until the restoration of the monarchy, at least). Yet, after the American Revolution, the newly-created American nation had much greater difficulties in navigating the minefield of sovereignty. Unlike the British, and having a republican form of government, it was impossible to restore the monarchy. As a result, they produced new fictions, which also managed to centralize the “consent of the many” into the “hands of the few.”

As interesting as this book was to me, it lacked some of the dynamism that can be found in some of Edmund Morgan’s other work. I know for certain this is not because of the age of the book, as I found Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea and The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop—which predate this work—both to be far more alive. The same is true of his later work, American Slavery, American Freedom. Nevertheless, this is a great book for those who are interested in the nitty-gritty theory and practice of political thought. For others, I’m not sure that it will be quite so significant.