The people in modern political thought: an outline history

The people is a significant presence in the political thought of the modern era. Popular sovereignty is a key concept of modern political thinking. Yet the people itself, the possessor of that sovereignty, is given little attention in the history of modern political thought. This article sketches an outline history of how modern political thought has answered the question of how it is possible to conceive of the population of a nation as united into being a single corporate entity, such that the fact that a population comprises many individuals with many different preferences and points of view is no obstacle to describing it as having a single will and a capacity for single action. Hobbes is the point of departure, and the first half of the article describes responses to Hobbes on the part of, among others, Pufendorf, Locke, and Rousseau. It then turns to the conceptualisation of the revolutionary period and its aftermath, focusing in particular on liberalism’s failure to develop a proper theory of the people. The article ends with Schmitt’s critique of this failure, and with early twentieth-century liberalism’s move to dispense with the people altogether.