Democracy and the Right of Revolution

Abstract

Since sovereignty is often thought of as incompatible with democracy, I would like to look at this relationship in more detail. The fullest discussion of this subject by Hobbes is in The Elements of Law. There he says that of the three sorts of government, ‘the first in order of time … is democracy, and it must be so of necessity, because an aristocracy and a monarchy, require nominations of persons agreed upon’. A democracy exists ‘where the votes of the major part involve the votes of the rest’ (EL,II,2,1). When a group of individuals covenant together to be bound by majority decisions, we have the creation of a commonwealth in which the people possess the sovereign power. When Hobbes says that democracy is first in time he means reconstructed time. Working back from our current political system to its genesis, we have to start with a democracy, if we accept Hobbes’s assumptions about human motivations and the state of nature. This is the only way an absolute monarchy, for example, can be morally justified in his eyes. But it is also true that the smaller political structures out of which larger ones are built ultimately rest on the willingness of a group of individuals, especially the warriors, to put themselves under a leader and obey his commands.