The Dominion of Foreignty and The Absurdity of Illegitimacy

On some contradictions in the notions of sovereignty and legitimacy

“The frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, depicting the Sovereign as a massive body wielding a sword and crosier and composed of many individual people” (Wikipedia).

Traditionally, as I’m about to argue here, the notion of political power was approached through at least two distinct conceptual pillars. The dominance was either fixed in one of them or was set as a ground in-between. Those two pillars, I believe, are orbiting around the notions of sovereignty and legitimacy. They weren’t always articulated in a similar fashion, but what was regularly meant by any of those concepts was more or less the same. Neither the meaning of sovereignty nor that of legitimacy can be mistaken by a contemporary mind, fogged by the popular political language. Still, what are they?

Contrary to the usual differentiation between them, these two terms are closely related. First of all, in their contemporary disguise, they were both tailored and fashioned during what we usually refer to as ‘the dawn of modern political theory.’ Most prominently, of course, in the writings of thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc. Secondly, as a result of their usefulness when it comes to interpreting the present state of affairs, namely, the hegemony of liberalism and its core political program — what we usually refer to as ‘representative democracy.’

Still, my conviction is that those terms aren’t and have never been used as closely as they should, especially in the realm of political thinking and rhetoric. What I argue is that, within the framework of democracy, they might be thought of, if not as entirely interchangeable, then at least to a greater or lesser extent as unneeded.

You probably already asked yourself what in Locke’s name I could mean by this. Well, for starters, they are contrary to the very spirit and goals of democracy. That is if we are to take this utterly wasted verbiage word literally, of course. By any means, this might serve us well. It might even empower us; who knows?

Not solely, in my view, because an act like this could reveal where the hypocrisy of the mainstream discourse lies. Juggling with words and concepts, poking their initial meaning, usually does that—a strangely mastered magic, unveiling the historical concealment of oppression. This is what thinking should do. By implicit honor, if not entirely by vocation. Dealing with words literally (in that particular case, if not in any), binds us to a calling—to search for distinct ways to navigate those darkened seas of ours. The towers of viable possibilities, usually well-spread around the stony shores of wrecked dreams and shallow dreads of any time, even ours, might suddenly flash our eyes.

To present to the reader exactly why I think this is the case when it comes to democracy, first I’ll have to briefly define what sovereignty and legitimacy are. To understand their meaning, to grasp them as precisely as possible, one needs to approach and evaluate; one needs to analyze both the history and the development of political power, its perception, and how people not only lived with and through it but also thought about it. I don’t mean, however, to be as precise as possible here. That is why I will allow myself some non-academic and not-so-justified deviations.

Kind of definitions

On the one hand, sovereignty designates the person or group in charge of how things are now and are about to be in the future. Legitimacy, on the other hand, is concerned with the support and recognition they have to do so from those who are about to suffer both the present situation and its consequences.

Historically, during the so-called transition to modern-type states as a result of the fall of French monarchism and the establishment of liberal constitutions around the Western world, the understanding of who the sovereign is has fundamentally shifted from the idea of the monarch to that of the people. The monarch received his political power (hence, its legitimacy) as being as closest to God as possible. It’s he who’ll judge him in the end. God might not suffer the consequences of the monarch's decisions, but it will be he who will hold him accountable.

The people, on the other hand, receive their political power and become sovereign as a result of the very fact of their humanity—the imagined and abstract notion of natural law lies at the core of this understanding. Thus, as it’s usually stated, the advent of the modern state was guided by a revolution in the ways loyalties were distributed, with an inner circle of loyalty expanding and an outside circle contracting (Wight 1978: 25).

To clarify things a bit, ‘All people are born equal’ was, fundamentally, an attack against the superiority of the monarch, his court retinue, the aristocracy, and, more generally, the feudal lords. The privileged monarchic position branched out from an intra-ecological, let’s say societal, interpretation of what the medievals inherited from the most prominent thinkers of antiquity, namely — scala naturae. According to this formula, people are on top of the ladder of beings—above animals, plants, and non-animated entities—as a consequence of their complexity, intelligence, and values. Thus, by association, there should be people who are on top of other people and, in the Christian mindset stated above, closest to God.

In the new situation, the famous 'social contract’ was put into action. It’s the people whom the governing body needs to be as close to as possible; they need to seduce them since it’s the people who are empowering those who rule.

The contradictions

Already here lies a set of contradictions that is hard to run away from. Most prominently, that democracy, if it’s to be the power of the people, as sovereigns of themselves, as representatives of themselves, it’s the very fact of their political co-engagement, their co-participation, that by definition bears legitimacy. The people who are governing themselves don’t need ‘legitimacy,’ understood as recognition and support, since they aren’t representing anyone else besides themselves. Some argue that this notion can be meaningful only outside of the community, from someone foreign looking at it, but even that is a false claim.

To put it yet differently, if their legitimacy is to mean something here, i.e. within the image of truer democratic practices, the people derive it by their political acts; by their own politically motivated and argued positions and exchanges during the process of community(or society)-based decision-making, which is, in the end, concerned with the very same people’s present and future. Thus, legitimacy is fundamentally the very fact of people’s sovereignty. If, on the other hand, all the people are sovereigns of themselves, sovereignty dissolves within the notion of personhood and the individual’s willingness to engage with his peers.

These concepts, in my view, exist precisely because people are governed, and not governing. But the ‘true’ sovereign, namely the people, exist as such only insofar as they legitimize someone else sovereignty over them. And by doing that we ‘sovereignize’ not only individual politicians, their parties, or given decisions of theirs, but also the ruling economic interests that oppress and alienate us from one another, from ourselves and from the world we live (the Husserlian Lebenswelt, life-world) to begin with.

Delegating our ‘rights’ over our present and future, moreover, the becoming-governed means turning someone foreign to our needs and aspirations into our lord and, quite often, our butcher. It’s a voluntary, collective act that explicitly elevates a person or a group above everyone else. Their privileged sociopolitical, economic and symbolically acclaimed position leads to incapacity to grasp the governed's same needs and aspirations. Hence, the ‘foreignity’ from the title. The one who governs is always foreign to the governed and as such, he’s illegitimate.

We, what’s more, pretend that there’s some control over those processes through the so-called ‘civic’ actions. As the story goes, the latter are acts of delegitimization, with which we held accountable our representatives, those we’ve elevated. These are, to put it otherwise, actions that the so-called ‘civic society’ performs to dethrone the ersatz monarchs and feudal lords.

The civic society and its delusions

The civic society is yet another abstract representative of the people and the natural law that already presupposes a sort of collective subjectivity. It’s the shared belief in the mechanisms of representative democracy—the fact that we (as was God before us) can hold accountable the ‘active sovereigns,’ that is, the government, for their actions and thus reclaim the ‘true’ sovereign, that is, the people—that makes this hallucination almost real.

In the real reality, nevertheless, the civic society operates more or less as a bunch of informal, aspiring heirs to the throne. To dish Carlin Almighty with Debordian spices, I’ll say that it’s all part of the spectacle, folks, and it’s bad for ya.

Additionally, the civic society’s informality demands a sort of membership. Its members are typically based in privileged cities and neighborhoods; they have privileged education and high income and quickly turn into our average politicians once the ‘civic’ coup d’état is done.

This is precisely why that form of informal, abstract, and shared divinity of the representative democratic process historically functions through violent (if not always physical, at least always vocal) exclusion and radical elitism. It’s the active sovereign that needs, first and foremost, to recognize the ‘civic society’ to leave its pulpit, not the other way around. Hence the all-to-common demands for ‘visible leaders’ of any civil disobedience whatsoever and yet another demand for representatives of the representatives.

Those leaders also embody the need for the ‘legitimacy’ of the disobedience itself. If a movement doesn’t function like the liberal state spectacle with its leaders and programs, then it doesn’t have a legitimate reason to protest. Therefore, they don’t represent the people. You know the drill. These leaders will, by default, be the same people who will inherit the throne. Either by joining the already existing party structures, as is usually the case in the USA and other two- or three-party model countries or, as is the case in Europe, by creating their own ‘project,’ inspired and epitomized by the protest movement and its ideals. That is why those same leaders should be visible and recognized, for the second time, by the latent but omnipotent, true sovereign—the ruling economic class.

Kind of conclusion

Following those reflections of mine, the notions investigated here sound more than shallow. They are both part of what Wendy Brown calls, following Foucault, the power discourse. The bourgeois law, like any other written, codified law that ever existed, was raised on a simple foundation—the idea to immortalize itself.

Bearing from the Romans their notion of imperium, or what Ulpian formulated as the people’s transfer of “… their power to the Emperor” (Cum lege regia, quae de imperio eius lata est, populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem conferat (Ulpian, Digest I.4.1)), and the notion of democracy from the Greeks, our ruling classes created a theatre of shadows that fights with themselves.

If only people were to govern themselves...