Popular Resistance and Popular Sovereignty: Roman Law and the Monarchomach Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty

Rousseau, Bodin, and the Medieval Corporatist Origins of Popular Sovereignty

“…to be perhaps the most important theorist of popular sovereignty." 54 Rousseau's own debt to Bodin certainly goes a long way in validating Lee's claim.…”

“…As Lee himself notes, "Bodin offers a theory of the popular state that relies on a typical argument derived from medieval corporatist thought to get around this problem." 60 Bodin was merely restating arguments that civilian and canonist lawyers had been formulating for the past two centuries. Indeed, Bodin's debt to corporatist law is evident throughout the République: in an earlier chapter, for instance, he notes how "the Lawyers, and lawmakers (whom we ought as guides to follow in reasoning of a Commonweale) .…”

“…As Lee explains, for Baldus, "the members themselves-when 'rightly assembled' [congregatur bene]-are perfectly capable of acting for the whole corporation, not in their private individual capacities, but together as a 'corporate person' [persona universalis] by the expression of the corporate will through their collective consent." 72 Baldus thus assigned to the individual members of the civitas the same kind of dual identity as Bodin and Rousseau. "As the corporeal members of the corporation," citizens could be construed as "partakers in sovereignty," but "the citizens taken as individuals are in the position of subjects in relation to the populus as a corporate whole," noted Joseph Canning.…”

“…First, he demonstrates that Bodin was not an advocate of absolute monarchy but believed instead that a welladministered monarchy should "govern indirectly through law and through legally constituted magistrates." 6 Secondly, Lee dispels the common misperception that Bodin did not recognize the possibility of popular sovereignty. 7 Not only did Bodin accept popular sovereignty as wholly legitimate (if, in his view, undesirable), but he defined it in a way that closely resembles, and may even inform, how we understand it today.…”

Sovereignty and Decentralization – two competing perspectives on the crisis of the French monarchy in the 16th century

“…the real sovereign, and at the same time to essentially strip it from any possibility of a direct action which could be carried out only by the tutors, precisely because the people, as their "ward" was incapable of doing so. 76 When Brutus subsequently moved on to analyse the contractual obligations of the king and the people, the fiction of the corporate entity and its representatives could conveniently be employed not only to explain how the people was able to form any contract with the monarch in the first place, but also to show who was obliged to act in case its terms were breached. It was an issue of crucial importance because the Vindiciae's argument regarding the right to oppose the king relied heavily upon two separate contracts or covenants.…”