Short Comment on Melissa Lane’s Popular Sovereignty Paper
Paul Sagar
Professor Lane’s paper offered a fascinating approach to conceptualising both
Ancient Greek political thought and our own conceptions of popular sovereignty.
Through innovative readings of Aristotle and Plato, she urged us to think about
how sovereignty can be understood through political offices, and not merely the
individuals who hold them.
Yet any discussion of the Greeks in the context of popular sovereignty
immediately invites caution, simply because the Greeks lacked that concept for
themselves. Professor Lane’s paper encourages us to understand the Greek
kurios as roughly equivalent to our concept of ‘authority’. This is important. The
modern concept of ‘sovereignty’ is umbilically linked to questions of ‘authority’,
and also of ‘legitimacy’ (another concept arguably lacked by the Greeks). This is
because sovereignty theory is in significant measure justification theory: it seeks
to explain not only who has (or should have) ultimate political decision-making
power, but more fundamentally who has (or should have) the legitimate
authority to exercise that power, and thus rightfully coerce others.
A theory of sovereignty thus needs an account of authority. But it is at least
arguable that the Greek’s lacked any such concept. Kurios is only controversially
rendered ‘authority’; it could also be rendered as pertaining to mastery and
lordship, and the possession of powers of ownership. On this understanding,
lacking a concept of authority the Greeks would also seem to lack a concept of
modern sovereignty.
Why is this significant? What is wrong with retrospectively supplying the
Ancients with modern conceptualisations that render their thought more
perspicuous and comprehensible? Perhaps nothing. But we should bear in mind
the warnings of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, and in his shadow Bernard
Williams and Alistair MacIntyre. That rather than improving the thought of the
Ancients, we may be failing to appreciate when they were better off than we are
now.
Consider a (for now) necessarily speculative possibility. Let us suppose that
sovereignty theory is a post-Roman, European Christendom phenomenon. The
Greeks necessarily lacked it. But who says they were worse off for lacking it?
Perhaps they show us that, at the very least, sovereignty theory is surplus to
political requirements for a functioning society. Perhaps they show us more: that
sovereignty theory is acquired baggage from a Christian era that we are now
moving out of, and would actually be better off without. Rather than giving the
Greeks our supposedly improved concepts, maybe the lesson should run in the
other direction. I should stress that I do not wish to claim that this is definitely
so. But I do suggest that in dealing with the Ancients, we always keep in mind the
possibility that it might be so.